Backend Engineer / Awareness Team
We're a product-first team on a mission to raise the cybersecurity posture of every company in the world.
Riot started with a simple idea: cybersecurity training was broken, and employees deserved better than annual hour-long videos no one watches. We built Awareness - chat-based, 4-minute courses delivered by Albert, our cyber instructor that employees actually look forward to hearing from. Think Duolingo, but for cybersecurity.
That was just the beginning. 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 - fast.
- 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.
Created in 2020, Riot has raised $45m from top-tier investors (Y Combinator, Base10, Funders Club, Frst Capital), and now protects more than 2,000,000 employees in over 2,000 companies - including Intercom, Deel, Deezer, L'Occitane, Lovable, and Veolia - around the world.
Cybersecurity is everywhere. It impacts everyone, every day, and it's the number one risk to any organization. Yet the cybersecurity posture in most companies is still a disaster, and hackers are exploiting it by targeting the weakest link: employees. We're on a mission to fix that - at scale.
About the Awareness team
You'll join the team behind Riot's flagship product.
Awareness is the chat-based learning experience that millions of employees actually look forward to : short, sharp, character-driven cybersecurity courses delivered in Slack, Teams, Google Chat or email.
Awareness is also home to Studio, our custom content creation tool that lets security teams build their own training in minutes instead of weeks.
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.
About the role
- 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
- 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.
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:
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
About you
- 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.
- You don't need to be a cybersecurity expert, but you need to be motivated by the mission.
- Elixir/Phoenix experience is a plus, not a requirement - we've onboarded strong engineers from Ruby, Python, and Go backgrounds.
- You're based in Paris or willing to relocate.
Recruitment process
- First call with Thomas, our Talent Acquisition Manager (30 min)
- 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 min)
It'll be a cultural fit if
- You have high standards: expect performance to be nothing short of the best.
- You're enthusiastic at heart: you exhibit passion and excitement over the work.
- You don't just use AI tools - you push them. You're already rethinking your workflow every few weeks as the tools evolve, and you'd be bored anywhere that isn't doing the same.
Why join us at Riot
- Join a financially healthy company. We're capital-efficient, and fundraising fuels our momentum rather than keeping the lights on.
- Contribute to a fast-growing startup with a clear vision and clear business goals. We've tripled revenue over the past two years and plan to grow from €20M to €40M ARR in 2026.
- Work alongside a team that takes AI adoption seriously - you'll have the tools, the budget, and the mandate to push the boundary of what's possible with AI-assisted engineering.
- Experience the energy of a collaborative team in our modern and cosy office in the heart of Paris: République / Canal Saint-Martin.