Backend Engineering Intern
- Role
- Backend
- Employment
- Full-time
- Company size
- Startup
Open to US only. Set where you work from to check your eligibility.
No BS summary
This is a backend engineering internship on the systems that carry real product workflows. Candidate data arrives messy and at volume, has to be modelled well enough to search and score against, and then has to move reliably through jobs, integrations, and APIs that other parts of the product depend on.
Required skills
Location: Remote (United States)
Work Model: Remote
Industry: AI recruiting and talent marketplace (B2B SaaS)
Compensation: $35–$50 per hour
About the Company
TalentPluto is a Y Combinator-backed startup building the hiring stack for high-growth companies. We run two connected products: a talent network that places engineering, go-to-market, and operations people into fast-moving startups, and an AI recruiting tool that lets a hiring team run candidate search, tiered enrichment, rubric-based scoring, and outbound campaigns directly from their assistant. We work with dozens of venture-backed startups across AI, developer tools, fintech, and healthcare. The team is small and founder-led, and interns work on live problems rather than practice ones.
The Opportunity
This is a backend engineering internship on the systems that carry real product workflows. Candidate data arrives messy and at volume, has to be modelled well enough to search and score against, and then has to move reliably through jobs, integrations, and APIs that other parts of the product depend on. You will build and extend those systems, and you will be the one who finds out when they are wrong.
The work is a good fit for someone who enjoys correctness and reliability: designing a schema that will still make sense in six months, making a background job idempotent, or tracing a bad record back through three services to its source. Because the team is small, you will own services rather than tickets, and your work will be in production quickly.
Responsibilities
Build and extend backend services, APIs, and the data models behind them. Design and maintain database schemas that support search, scoring, and reporting. Build background jobs and integrations, and make them reliable enough to run unattended. Investigate data quality and correctness issues, and fix them at the source. Write code other engineers can read and extend, and review theirs.
Requirements
Strong programming fundamentals in TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, or a similar language. Comfort learning backend systems, APIs, databases, and data modelling. Interest in building reliable systems that support real product workflows. Has shipped meaningful work before, whether side projects, class projects, open-source contributions, or a prior internship. Strong problem-solving ability and a willingness to learn quickly. Clear communicator who can work independently in a remote environment.
What you'll do
- Build and extend backend services, APIs, and the data models behind them.
- Design and maintain database schemas that support search, scoring, and reporting.
- Build background jobs and integrations, and make them reliable enough to run unattended.
- Investigate data quality and correctness issues, and fix them at the source.
- Write code other engineers can read and extend, and review theirs.
What they require
- Strong programming fundamentals in TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, or a similar language.
- Comfort learning backend systems, APIs, databases, and data modelling.
- Interest in building reliable systems that support real product workflows.
- Has shipped meaningful work before, whether side projects, class projects, open-source contributions, or a prior internship.
- Strong problem-solving ability and a willingness to learn quickly.
- Clear communicator who can work independently in a remote environment.
Talentpluto (YC) is building AI-native infrastructure for the future of hiring and professional representation.