Senior Backend Engineer, Actors

About the role

Apify is the marketplace of ready-to-run tools for AI that automate work on the web. Thousands of Actors get web data, generate leads, monitor social media, track competitors, and integrate with existing apps and agents. Actors are created by a global community of builders who earn from them, while Apify manages infrastructure, billing, and distribution. Learn more at apify.com http://apify.com.

Join us to help people put the web to work. Apify can find missing children https://blog.apify.com/fighting-child-traffickers-with-technology/, protect consumers from fake discounts across the EU https://blog.apify.com/how-web-scraping-ai-and-the-eu-have-come-together-to-sweep-away-fake-discounts-in-europe/, and feed data to AI chatbots https://blog.apify.com/intercom-customer-support-ai-chatbot-web-scraping/.

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join a small, cross-functional team of experienced hackers building and scaling some of Apify Store’s most popular Actors. You'll push these products forward with new features and new approaches, including AI, build the internal tooling that makes other engineering teams faster, and mentor junior engineers as they grow into independent web automation engineers.

WHAT YOU'LL BE WORKING ON:

- Building and scaling cloud programs (Actors) that crawl and extract data reliably under real-world load

- Pushing some of the most popular Actors in Apify Store forward: coming up with new features, trying new approaches (including AI), and shaping where these products go next, while making sure they stay fast and reliable for the thousands of users who depend on them

- Working on internal projects and tooling that make other teams at Apify faster, from shared libraries and AI-powered tools to building blocks other engineers rely on every day. AI is changing how web automation gets built, so you'll put it to work day to day and help keep improving how the team works with it.

- Writing clean, elegant code, and keeping it that way through reviews and refactoring

- Reverse-engineering how websites work behind the scenes, and designing APIs other developers love to use

- Mentoring junior engineers on the team: reviewing their code, pairing with them on complex challenges, and helping them grow into independent web automation engineers.

- Owning the design of the Actors and tools you build, and making sure they fit well with the rest of the team's codebase

HOW WE WORK:

- Built on our own tools: We use TypeScript, and the core building blocks are libraries we develop and open source ourselves: Crawlee https://crawlee.dev/ for crawling and scraping, and the Apify SDK https://docs.apify.com/sdk/js/ for running on the platform.

- Unblocking: Getting past anti-bot protection is a core part of the job, and we build our own tools for it. These include tools for browser-like HTTP requests, realistic browser fingerprints, and Apify Proxy https://docs.apify.com/platform/proxy with datacenter and residential IPs. You’ll use them, improve them, and help shape what we build next.