Senior Anti-Bot / Scraping Engineer

About ScrapeGuys

ScrapeGuys builds hotel and flight pricing intelligence APIs. Our customers send us a query and get back structured, real-time rates from across the travel market — without running any scraping infrastructure of their own. Behind that simple API sits the hard part: collecting data reliably, at scale, from sources that actively don't want to be collected from.

About the role

You'll own the data acquisition layer that everything else depends on. That means designing and maintaining request-based scrapers that work against commercial bot-protection systems — no browser farms, no per-request AI, just precisely-constructed HTTP.

This is a senior, high-autonomy role. You'll decide how targets get approached, own the cost and reliability of the pipeline, and be the person the team turns to when a source changes overnight.

What you'll do

• Design, build and maintain request-based scrapers for new and existing data sources.
• Analyse and defeat commercial anti-bot systems, working from wire-level captures rather than guesswork.
• Own proxy strategy — provider selection, pool health, session management and cost per record.
• Keep collection reliable as targets evolve: fingerprints, header contracts and challenge formats all change without notice.
• Build the monitoring that tells us a source has broken before our customers notice.
• Document what you learn so the team isn't dependent on one person's memory.

What you'll bring

• 3+ years building production scrapers, including against actively defended targets.
• Hands-on experience defeating a commercial anti-bot system — Akamai, Imperva, DataDome, PerimeterX, Kasada or Cloudflare.
• Practical TLS fingerprinting knowledge — JA3/JA4, and the ability to shape a ClientHello rather than only pick from presets. Experience with utls, tls-client, curl_cffi or similar.
• A working understanding of HTTP/2 beyond "it's faster" — SETTINGS, header ordering, and why those are observable to a server.
• Wire-level debugging skills — mitmproxy, Charles or equivalent, and a clear sense of when browser devtools stop being enough.
• Proxy operations experience — residential, mobile and ISP pools, sticky versus rotating sessions, and how IP reputation behaves under real load.
• Strong Python; comfort in Go, or the appetite to pick it up quickly.
• Rigour under uncertainty. In this work you will be wrong often. We care most about engineers who design tests that can disprove their own theories, and who notice early when an explanation has stopped fitting the evidence.

Nice to have

• Travel, OTA or GDS data experience — fare structures, availability, inventory.
• Async Python at scale: concurrency control, backpressure, graceful degradation.
• Experience integrating commercial challenge-solving services.
• Data pipeline work — storage, deduplication, time-series price history.

What we offer

• Fully remote, with flexible hours and asynchronous working.
• Genuine ownership — you set the technical direction for data acquisition.
• Hard, interesting problems with immediate, measurable outcomes.
• A small team, short decision paths, and no layers between you and the work.
• Budget for the tools, proxies and services the job actually needs.

How to apply

Send your resume to careers@scrapeguys.com, along with your availability and your expectations. Please include a short paragraph on the hardest anti-bot problem you've solved — what the target was, how you approached it, and how you verified it actually worked.

We read every application and reply either way. Shortlisted candidates go through a technical conversation and a short, paid practical exercise — no unpaid take-homes and no whiteboard algorithms.