Backend Engineer / Awareness Team

Riot is looking for a Backend Engineer to join the Awareness Team in Paris. It’s a full-time, onsite role focused on building and scaling the company’s flagship employee security product. If you enjoy turning complex problems into reliable systems and shipping features that millions of learners can use confidently, this could be a good fit. The team is small, senior, and trusted, with engineers owning features end-to-end in close partnership with product managers and designers.

Riot’s goal is to raise the cybersecurity posture of every company in the world. Awareness delivers chat-based, four-minute cybersecurity courses, curated by Albert, the cyber instructor employees actually want to hear from. The broader Riot lineup also includes Studio for quick, custom security training, plus products like Simulation, Inbox, Sonar, and Slash to cover different angles of how employees interact with security. Created in 2020, Riot has raised 45 million dollars from top investors and now protects more than 2,000,000 employees across more than 2,000 companies worldwide, including Intercom, Deel, Deezer, L’Occitane, Lovable, and Veolia. Cybersecurity is a constant presence, and Riot aims to fix it at scale by helping employees become a stronger line of defense.

You’ll join the team behind Riot’s flagship product and help keep millions of learners engaged with security content delivered through Slack, Teams, Google Chat, or email. Awareness also hosts Studio, which lets security teams craft their own training in minutes. The hard problems you’ll tackle sit at the intersection of delivering chat-based content reliably at scale, modelling flexible org structures, and building authoring tools that feel as good as the content they generate. The team’s culture is fast, with a focus on honest feedback and using AI tools to accelerate both development and review.

Everyday work you’ll own

In this role you’ll push new Awareness features from concept to production and design backend systems that can serve millions of learners and thousands of administrators with reliability. You’ll help organize the backend codebase and set the engineering standards the team follows, while researching and prototyping approaches to the toughest problems. You’ll work alongside PMs and designers to ensure the product evolves in line with user needs and business goals. You’ll also operate within Riot’s AI-enabled development environment, where tools like Claude Max, Codex and Cubic are treated as first-class collaborators, and where integrations with Linear, Notion and GitHub help provide real context for code, tickets and specs.

The technology stack you’ll touch includes Elixir and Phoenix on the backend with PostgreSQL, Oban and LiveView, running on AWS with Terraform, and monitored by Datadog and Sentry. The frontend stack features Vue 3, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS and Cypress for testing. AI tooling is part of daily workflows, not an afterthought, and the team actively uses these capabilities to move quickly while maintaining quality.

Who fits this role

• Two or more years of hands-on experience building backend applications in production
• Strong skills with SQL and relational data modeling
• Regularly uses AI coding tools as part of daily work
• A true team player who welcomes feedback and treats it as a growth opportunity
• Ability to prioritise and ship on time without compromising quality
• Motivation to work on Riot’s mission, even if cybersecurity isn’t your current specialty
• Elixir/Phoenix experience is a plus, not a requirement, engineers from Ruby, Python, or Go backgrounds have joined successfully
• Based in Paris or willing to relocate

• Experience with Elixir/Phoenix is a bonus, but candidates without it can still thrive if they show a track record of picking up new stacks
• Exposure to security or education-focused products would help but isn’t required
• Familiarity with building and operating AI-assisted development pipelines is useful

Tips for applicants

Lead your resume with a summary of at least two years of production backend work, and call out any involvement with Elixir or Phoenix or other languages if you’ve worked with them or are ready to learn quickly.

Show how you prove the must-haves: demonstrate your SQL proficiency and how you’ve designed relational schemas for scalable systems, ideally with examples that hint at handling large user bases or complex permissions. Tie these examples to projects where you shipped features end-to-end and worked with cross-functional teammates.

Be ready for the interview path Riot uses: a 30-minute first call with Thomas, the Talent Acquisition Manager; a 1-hour technical interview focused on system design with the Engineering Manager; a take-home case; an onsite cultural-fit interview with your future manager and teammate; and finally a 30-minute fit interview with the CTO. Have crisp stories ready that show how you’ve moved quickly without sacrificing quality and how you’ve handled feedback.

Ask a pointed question about how AI tooling shapes daily work and product decisions: for example, how Claude Code and Codex are deployed as part of the normal development workflow, and how the team measures the impact of AI-assisted changes on reliability and speed. You can also ask how MCP integrations with Linear, Notion and GitHub help keep the team aligned on code and specs.