Senior Backend Engineer

About Paragon

Paragon is the leading integration infrastructure platform for AI. Companies like Zendesk, Postman, and Five9 use Paragon to power integrations for agent tool calling, RAG ingestion, and more. With 130+ pre-built connectors, fully-managed authentication, and embedded SDK / APIs designed for native product integrations, Paragon helps developers scale integrations 10x faster than building in-house.

About The Role

At Paragon, we are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our workflow engine team. Youʼll be one of the key engineers shaping the architecture, reliability, and evolution of one of Paragonʼs core products. Youʼll work across our backend stack - TypeScript (NestJS), Postgres, Redis, Kafka, and Kubernetes - to build and operate the systems that power workflow execution end-to-end. That includes ingesting and processing events, evaluating triggers and conditions, managing workflow state, orchestrating async execution across steps, and ensuring workflows run reliably under retries, failures, and bursty production traffic. This role is ideal for someone who has already built or owned distributed backend systems and wants to work on hard problems around orchestration, correctness, reliability, and product infrastructure in a small, fast-moving team. How we work

• We value collaboration and thoughtful engineering over heroics.
• We invest in good documentation, code review, and mentorship so people can ramp quickly.
• We aim for and focus on fixing root causes, not repeating incidents.
  
  

What You’ll Do

What youʼll do

• Own major parts of the Workflow Engine architectureand help drive how it evolves as the product and customer base scale.
• Design, build, and operate backend services for workflow ingestion, orchestration, execution, and observability using TypeScript (NestJS), Postgres, Redis, Kafka, and Kubernetes
• Build systems that process external and internal events, evaluate workflow triggers and logic, and execute multi-step workflows reliably across distributed infrastructure.
• Design workflow execution models that handle retries, backoff, timeouts, deduplication, idempotency, and partial failures safely.
• Improve how we manage workflow state, including long-running executions, step coordination, cancellations, replay, and auditability.
• Build and evolve multi-tenant systems with strong guarantees around tenant isolation, fair usage, rate limiting, and noisy neighbor protection
• Raise the bar on reliability and observability: logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerting, and tooling that helps both engineers and customers understand what happened in a workflow run.
• Partner closely with product and design to shape workflow capabilities, execution behavior, and developer-facing abstractions that are both powerful and understandable.
• Help improve the ergonomics of building on top of the Workflow Engine by creating better internal abstractions, patterns, and operational tooling.
• Provide technical leadership: mentor other engineers, influence engineering practices, and be a go-to person for difficult debugging and architecture decisions.
  
  

What You’ll Bring

What weʼre looking for

• 6+ years of experience building and operating backend systems in production, ideally with TypeScript / Node.js (NestJS or similar framework).
• Strong experience building distributed systems and reasoning clearly about reliability, correctness, and tradeoffs in production environments.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures and technologies like Kafka:
• Topic design, schema evolution, retries, dead-letter handling, delivery guarantees, and handling out-of-order or duplicate events.
• Strong practical experience building asynchronous processing systems:
• Queues, workers, schedulers, background jobs, orchestration layers, or other systems that coordinate work across services.
• Strong practical understanding of dempotency, retries, concurrency control, failure recovery, and safe handling of side effects
• Deep experience with Postgres:
• Data modeling, transactional correctness, indexing, and performance tuning for operational systems.
• Strong practical experience using Redisfor caching, coordination, locking, rate limiting, or transient execution state.
• Solid experience shipping and debugging services in Kubernetes in a cloud environment.
• Experience building multi-tenant systems with strong reliability and isolation guarantees.
• Proven track record of technical ownership:
• Driving projects end-to-end, making sound design decisions, and improving systems over time rather than just shipping features.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, and a product mindset — you care about the “why” behind what you build and can translate between business requirements and technical design. If youʼre excited about this role but donʼt meet every single requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Weʼre looking for strong fundamentals, good judgment, and growth mindset. Nice to have
• Experience building or owning a workflow engine, orchestration system, job runner, rules engine, or automation platform
• Background working on integration platforms, iPaaS products, or systems that execute customer-defined logic across third-party APIs.
• Experience designing systems for long-running workflows, scheduled execution, replay, or durable state machines.
• Experience with third-party APIs, webhooks, OAuth2, rate limits, and reliability concerns around outbound actions with side effects.
• Familiarity with developer-facing platform design: building primitives, abstractions, and tooling used by other engineers or external customers.
• Experience in high-growth startups or early-stage teams where youʼve owned systems end- to-end and helped define engineering standards.