Software Engineer, Backend Developer, AI Engineer (Applied​/Software)

This role is part of our Scraper API team, one of our growing brands up. Scraper API is an enterprise-scale web scraping solution, trusted by businesses across a wide range of industries to extract crucial data m e-commerce, travel to real estate and market research, we support companies in turning the web into actionable insights. We're currently on an exciting growth journey, scaling rapidly as demand for reliable, high-performance web scraping and data keeps rising.

This is the hard end of web scraping. The sites we rely on, Google, Amazon, Walmart and many others, actively work to block us, and they change the rules without warning. We're looking for a senior engineer who can go deep on why we're being blocked, work out how the detection actually functions, and design repeatable ways around it. You'll be joining a self-driven, high-autonomy team to take on our most involved problems, with the room and the trust to build something from close to a blank page: an environment that turns one-off breakthroughs into a methodical, repeatable way of defeating anti-bot systems.

If you like confronting problems that genuinely resist you, and you work methodically rather than by trial and error, this is an unusually open brief. Your immediate impact in the first 3-6 months will be:

• Getting a full local environment running and becoming fluent in our systems and how they operate, in the first few weeks.
• Contributing to a proposal on the design for a repeatable environment we can pose anti-bot problems to and get reliable analysis out of.
• Building that environment out over the following months so that, by month six, we can point it at a target or provider and have it reliably tell us how we're being blocked and what is and isn't being used against us.

Analyse how specific anti-bot and bot-mitigation systems (the likes of Data Dome, Cloudflare Turnstile, Kasada, PerimeterX and Akamai) detect and block us, and design systems to work around them. Turn isolated breakthroughs into durable, repeatable processes: hypothesis, test, discard what's wrong, move on. In collaboration with other senior team members, design and build a greenfield agentic environment that can propose and run tests on anti-bot behaviour and bypass approaches, and do it in a way that's well understood and repeatable.

Work largely independently on deep, concentrated problems, while actively pulling in knowledge from across the wider engineering team. Communicate clearly what you plan to do, and step into major incidents when the team needs your depth.

Deep, genuine understanding of how the internet works underneath: HTTP, TLS and fingerprinting, proxies, headers, cookies, and browser behaviour. This is the core of the role and it isn't something we can shortcut. Excellent problem-solving built on a scientific, methodical approach: you form a hypothesis, design a test, read the result honestly, and iterate. Trying things at random is the opposite of what this role needs.

Strong hands‑on skills in our stack, Node.js and Type Script with solid Python, and comfort across backend systems at scale (Postgres, Redis/Valkey, MongoDB, Puppeteer/Camoufox, Kubernetes). Real skill at directing AI coding agents with precision, and the judgement to tell strong output from weak. The specific tool doesn't matter (Claude, Codex or similar); knowing how to steer it well is what counts.

A background that has given you this kind of depth and rigour. That might be scraping, anti-bot or web-security work, reverse engineering, or a research or academic path where you built your own tooling and lived by the scientific method. Direct scraping experience is a strong plus rather than a strict requirement. Independence and strong…