Backend Engineer
Build the crawlers and AI search algorithm behind Rotto: millions of candidate profiles, thousands of career pages, every day.
About Rotto
Rotto is an AI search engine for recruiting. A recruiter describes the hire in plain English, and a hybrid semantic and lexical retrieval engine parses the intent, embeds it, and ranks millions of candidate profiles in real time.
It is built by the same team behind Migrate Mate, the job board for international talent in the US, which earned our founders Forbes 30 Under 30. We are a team of seven. We've raised $3M and are now hiring to scale Rotto and launch new products.
We move very fast with basically zero bureaucracy. You will work directly with the founders (& engineering team) every day. We work five days a week, 10 to 11 hours a day, in person, and occasionally on Saturdays. This is an ASAP hire: we would like you to start within weeks of an offer.
What you will work on
Scrapers that pull jobs from thousands of company career pages and job boards, every day.
The Postgres search that ranks millions of candidate profiles from a plain-English prompt.
The cloud infrastructure both run on, and the cost and latency of every request.
What we are looking for
We don't care about years of experience, education or pedigree. We just want you to be cracked at owning & scaling backend systems.
Must haves
- You have built and run web scrapers in production (ideally against job boards).
- You have scaled cloud infrastructure in production.
- You obsess over detail and are great at making tradeoffs, e.g. cutting latency without raising the cost of a search.
- You are AI native but not AI reliant: you use AI to move fast, and understand what it writes well enough to change it without AI.
Nice to haves
- Strong Python.
- Headless browsers (Playwright, Selenium or similar), proxies and anti-bot work.
- Tuning Postgres or vector search: indexes, query plans, pgvector.
- You have worked at a web scraping, data provider or job board company.
- You have worked at (or founded) an early-stage startup.
Is this you?
You'll thrive if
- You learn unusually fast and can be useful on an unknown topic within a day.
- Not knowing doesn't scare you, it excites you to learn.
- You are happy with little structure and manage yourself.
- You have a can-do attitude. You solve hard challenges without complaining.
- You communicate clearly and can explain the same idea to a customer and to a senior engineer.
- You push back on bad ideas, without questioning every decision.
Don't apply if
- You want a clear spec, a roadmap and a process to follow.
- You want to work remotely or hybrid.
- You want a 40-hour week. "Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week" - Elon Musk
- You need a big team around you before you can ship.
Work Authorization
We sponsor visas and will relocate the right person to New York. U.S. citizens, people with work authorization and people who need sponsorship can all apply.
Meet our founders
Co-Founder and CEO
Co-Founder and CTO
How hiring works
- 1
Apply
Two minutes, below.
- 2
Assessment
If you are a fit, we email you a technical assessment.
- 3
Code review call
We go through your code together.
- 4
Culture-fit interview
We want to get to know you as a person.
- 5
In-person trial
Work with us in NYC. We'll cover costs. Based on your schedule.
- 6
Offer
You could be starting at Rotto within weeks.
Apply
Applications close when we find the right fit.
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