Software Engineer, Marketplace

About the role

You will own the design and implementation of the core marketplace features that connect companies with recruiters and AI agents on our platform. You will collaborate closely with the marketplace product lead to translate hiring workflow requirements into robust, scalable software solutions. Your work will directly influence recruiter engagement, hiring manager satisfaction, and overall hiring outcomes through data-driven feature development. You will be responsible for understanding complex user behavior and converting it into intuitive interactions that streamline the recruitment process. This role requires you to build systems that balance performance, reliability, and an exceptional user experience for both recruiters and hiring managers. You will have the opportunity to automate significant portions of the marketplace operations, reducing manual overhead and increasing efficiency. Ultimately, your contributions will shape the critical infrastructure that powers one of the largest hiring marketplaces in the world.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect and build the core marketplace services that handle recruiter activation, role distribution, and hiring manager workflows.
• Analyze user behavior and engagement metrics to identify friction points and implement solutions that improve recruiter and hiring manager experiences.
• Develop and maintain the systems responsible for recruiter supply growth, ensuring efficient onboarding and ramp-up for new partners.
• Create payment and incentive tooling that accurately calculates and distributes recruiter earnings, driving performance and retention.
• Design and implement role distribution algorithms that optimize opportunity matching across the marketplace based on recruiter activity and profile.
• Identify, automate, and scale manual operational processes to reduce effort for recruiters, hiring managers, and internal support teams.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to define clear product requirements and deliver high-quality software on aggressive timelines.
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code that allows the engineering team to move fast without compromising long-term stability.
• Own specific metrics related to marketplace health, recruiter engagement, and conversion rates, and iterate based on data.
• Troubleshoot production issues rapidly, applying deep technical knowledge to resolve complex system failures with minimal downtime.
• Partner with the product lead to prioritize features that have the highest impact on hiring outcomes and recruiter satisfaction.
• Implement security and compliance best practices to ensure the integrity of financial transactions and user data within the marketplace.
• Mentor junior engineers by providing code reviews, technical guidance, and constructive feedback to elevate the entire team.
• Explore and prototype new technologies that could enhance marketplace performance, scalability, or recruiter tooling.

Requirements

• 1 to 6 years of professional software engineering experience in a fast-paced environment.
• Demonstrated ability to ship high-quality code quickly and iterate based on real-world feedback.
• Strong impact drive with a focus on improving outcomes for end users, specifically recruiters and hiring managers.
• Technical versatility across the software stack, from frontend interactions to backend services and data pipelines.
• Proven track record of writing clean, readable code that maintains quality under rapid development cycles.
• Experience building systems that handle payments, incentives, or financial calculations is highly relevant.
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to define problems and solutions in areas without clear specifications.
• Commitment to best practices in software engineering, including testing, monitoring, and documentation.

Nice to have

• Experience with marketplace or two-sided platform architectures.
• Background in recruiting, HR technology, or sales-related software systems.
• Knowledge of financial systems, reconciliation, and compliance in payment processing.
• Familiarity with AI agents or tooling used in automated hiring or talent matching.
• Experience contributing to open source projects or technical communities.

Practical notes

This role is full-time based in San Francisco. Paraform is backed by top-tier investors and operates with a high bar for execution and impact. The position requires close collaboration with cross-functional teams under aggressive growth targets.

Paraform is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Paraform is building the infrastructure where companies come to fill their most critical roles. Nearly $900B is spent on recruiting every year and the process is still broken. Paraform is building the global talent infrastructure where companies come to fill their most critical roles. Through every search, placement, and interaction on our platform, we capture proprietary hiring data that no one else has at scale, and that data powers the agentic systems we're building to make hiring faster, smarter, and more precise. We believe AI will create more jobs, not less https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox. As companies move faster with fewer constraints, they'll hire more ambitiously and for roles that didn't exist before, making the hiring layer more critical than ever.

THE ROLE

We have 15 engineers and $80M in ARR. That ratio is intentional. Every engineer at Paraform plays a massive role in shaping the direction of the business.

We're hiring a Software Engineer to work on our marketplace, the core of how Paraform connects companies with recruiters and candidates. You'll work closely with our marketplace product lead, shipping features that directly impact hiring manager experience, recruiter activation, and hiring outcomes.

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

Our marketplace is what makes Paraform work. You'll be building the systems and experiences that drive both sides of it:

• User behavior and

engagement: Understand user psychology and use it to shape how recruiters and hiring managers interact with the platform

• Recruiter supply growth: Build the systems that bring new recruiters onto the platform, ramp them up quickly, and keep the quality bar high
• Recruiter performance and incentives: Payments, incentive systems, and performance tooling that help recruiters do their best work on the platform
• Role distribution: Ensure every open role on the marketplace gets the attention it deserves by balancing recruiter activity across the marketplace
• Automation: Identify and automate manual processes that slow down recruiters, hiring managers, and internal operations

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 1 - 6 years of experience shipping high quality code in fast-paced environment
• Ships fast: You can take a well-defined problem and deliver a clean solution quickly
• Impact-driven: You care about making the experience better for recruiters and hiring managers. You get excited when something you shipped drives real hiring outcomes
• Technically sharp: You can move fast across the stack without sacrificing quality where it matters

WHY THIS ROLE

You'll have design and product support, clear priorities, and a team that ships constantly. Your work will directly shape how thousands of recruiters operate and how companies make their most important hires. If you want to build at a company where engineers punch well above their weight and the product actually matters, this is the job.

Paraform is a marketplace modernizing one of the largest and most fragmented markets in the world: hiring. We partner with industry leaders like Decagon, Palantir, Rippling, Abridge, and Hightouch to hire world-class talent, and are growing quickly - 8×-ing revenue last year.

Paraform is the first end-to-end AI recruiting marketplace that connects companies with thousands of specialized recruiters and AI agents that work together to fill roles faster and more accurately.

Our mission is to make hiring fast, reliable, and scalable for every company in the world.

At Paraform, we believe recruiting works best when the right people are working on the right problems, combining human judgment with AI that truly understands hiring. That's why we're building a new foundation for how companies hire, bringing together specialized recruiters and modern AI tools.

We treat recruiters like entrepreneurs, not vendors - and we're building the financial, operational, and technical infrastructure that powers their success.

We are backed by the best investors and technology leaders: Scale, Felicis, A*, BOND, Liquid 2, DST Global, the founders of YouTube, Instacart, Canva, and more.