Backend Engineer Riot

We're a product-first team on a mission to help grow the cybersecurity culture 🔐

We want to instill cybersecurity good practices to employees in a way that's actually effective, and entertaining enough so that employees don't feel like they're working. Think Duolingo but for cybersecurity.

We created a platform to easily rollout a cybersecurity awareness program: the platform sends chat-based 4-minutes long courses to teams. Following the courses, the other side of the platform simulates phishing attacks, to prepare employees to face hackers, but in a safe environment.

Created in 2020, Riot has raised $45m with leading investors (Y Combinator, Left Lane, Base10, Funders Club and First Capital) and is now protecting more than 2,000,000 employees in over 2,000 companies (including Intercom, Deel, and Deezer) all over the world.

Cybersecurity is everywhere. It's impacting everyone, everyday, and it's becoming the number one risk to any organization, whether it's a small business or a big firm. Yet, the cybersecurity culture in most companies is a disaster. Hackers are leveraging this by targeting the weakest link: the employees. We're on a mission to fix that.

Today, Riot is the employee security company, with products that cover every angle of how employees interact with security:

• Awareness: chat-based cybersecurity courses employees genuinely engage with, plus Studio, which lets security teams build their own custom training in minutes.
• Simulation: realistic phishing, smishing campaigns that train employees in a safe environment.
• Inbox: the AI-powered 24/7 cyber hotline for your security team. Employees report suspicious emails, ask questions about IT/Security, our AI classifies and prioritizes them, and your team responds.
• Sonar: DLP for Google Drive and OneDrive that stops data leaks before they happen. Sonar audits sharing configurations, gives employees clear guidance on what's safe to share with which partners, and delegates everyday decisions to your team while you keep control.
• Slash: email security that catches the attacks your filter misses. Albert alerts employees inside suspicious emails before they click, combines semantic and technical signals to spot sophisticated threats, and instantly removes confirmed threats from every inbox in the company.

Awareness, Simulation, Inbox, Sonar or Slash: we hire engineers for the product org, not for a single team. Where you land is decided during the process, based on what you're good at and where the need is.

Whichever team you join, the shape of the work is the same. You own features end to end, from the spec to production. You ship to 2,000,000 employees, which means anything you build has to hold up at scale on day one.

The hard problems are real: delivering chat-based content reliably at scale, modeling org hierarchies that bend without breaking, building authoring tools that feel as good as the content they produce.

The team is small, senior, and trusted. Engineers own features end-to-end and shape the product alongside PMs and designers, if a spec is wrong, you say so.

We ship fast, review hard, and use AI tooling to do both.

Requirements

What you will do 🤝

• Ship new Awareness features end-to-end
• Build robust systems that serve millions of learners and thousands of admin users reliably.
• Organize the backend code base and shape the standards the team follows.
• Research, pitch, and prototype solutions to hard problems

How we work with AI

AI tooling isn't a perk at Riot - it's how we build. Every engineer has a Claude Max plan and access to Codex, and we expect you to use them daily. Concretely, that means:

• Writing and reviewing code with Claude Code as a first-class collaborator, not an autocomplete.
• Using MCP integrations (Linear, Notion, GitHub) so your AI tools have real context on our codebase, tickets, and specs.
• Treating AI-first workflows as part of the craft: prompting well, knowing when to delegate to an agent vs. write it yourself, and sharing what works with the team.
• Building and improving internal automation pipelines.

If AI-assisted development still feels novel or optional to you, Riot isn't the right fit — and that's okay. We're building for engineers who already see this as the new baseline and want to push it further.

Our technical stack

• Backend: Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, Oban, LiveView
• Ops: AWS, Terraform, Datadog, Sentry
• Frontend: Vue 3, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Cypress
• AI tooling: Claude Code, Codex, Cubic

Who you are 🪪

• You're a doer. That's core to Riot's culture.
• You have 2+ years of experience building backend applications in production.
• You're comfortable working professionally with SQL and relational data modeling.
• You're already using AI coding tools seriously
• You're a team player, eager to give feedback and happy to receive it as a learning opportunity.
• You know how to prioritize to ship on time,  speed of execution is key, without compromising quality.
• Elixir/Phoenix experience is a plus, not a requirement: we've onboarded strong engineers from NodeJS, Ruby, Python, and Go backgrounds.
• You don't need to be an expert on cybersecurity, but you need to be motivated by the mission
• You have a full professional proficiency in English and native in French
• You're based in Paris or you're willing to relocate

Benefits

It will be a cultural fit if 🫂

• You're a doer: not afraid to get your hands dirty and get things done.
• You have high standards: expect performance to be nothing short of the best.
• You are an enthusiastic at heart: exhibit passion and excitement over work.

Why join us at Riot 💜

• Join a financially-healthy company: we're financially strong and highly capital-efficient. Fundraising fuels our momentum, enabling us to scale faster and unlock new growth opportunities.
• Contribute to a fast-growing startup with a strong vision and high ambitions, backed by clear business goals. We've tripled our revenue over the past two years, and we plan to grow from €20M to €40M ARR in 2026.
• Experience the energy of a collaborative team in our modern and cosy office located in heart of Paris: République / Canal Saint-Martin

Recruitment process 🎙️

• First call with Thomas, our Talent Acquisition Manager (30')
• Technical interview, system design, with the Engineering Manager (1h)
• Take-home case study
• Onsite cultural fit interview with your manager and a future teammate (1h30)
• Fit interview with our CTO (30')

At RIOT, we believe that diversity drives innovation and inclusion fosters belonging. We are committed to building a team that reflects a wide range of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. We welcome candidates from all walks of life and are dedicated to creating an environment where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered to thrive.

Please note that this is an on-site position with up to 2 days per weeks of remote work.