Our client is a VC-backed startup. In 2025, they delivered 18× growth, placing us in the top <1% of startups globally.
They’re developing an AI-powered job matching platform that is live, with 50k monthly active users.
The company's goal is simple: job search shouldn’t feel like work.
Looking for a Senior Backend Engineer (Node.js / Scraping Automation) to design and build the backend behind the auto-apply platform with a strong focus on ATS/job-board scraping and automation. This includes browser automation, CAPTCHAs, IP blocking, email-based verification flows, and multi-step login/sign-up journeys. You’ll also work on workers, queues, orchestration, status tracking, APIs and observability.
What You’ll Do:
- Design and develop a reliable web scraping & automation layer: handle and minimise CAPTCHAs, deal with IP blocking (IP rotation, proxies, rate limiting), automate systems with email verification, verification codes/links, logins, and other multi-step flows.
- Design and develop the backend for the auto-apply system.
- Build and scale high-load services: workers, task queues, flow orchestration.
- Build a platform that scales reliably: retries, deduplication, throttling, graceful degradation, timeouts.
- Design an architecture that scales across multiple ATS and job boards.
- Design an architecture that supports horizontal scaling and remains resilient to unstable external systems, UI changes, deadlocks, and partial failures.
- Set up monitoring and alerting for critical systems (CAPTCHA spikes, blocks, failure rates by ATS, queue health, etc.).
- Work with the Tech Lead to shape realistic technical requirements, API contracts, and pragmatic implementation decisions.
- 5-6+ years of commercial backend experience.
- Strong production experience with Node.js (TypeScript preferred).
- Practical production experience with Go and/or Python for scraping, automation, or integration-heavy services.
- Hands-on production experience with web scraping / browser automation: Playwright / Puppeteer / Selenium, dynamic websites, SPAs, unstable external systems, and anti-bot / anti-scraping constraints.
- Strong understanding of anti-bot / anti-scraping constraints: CAPTCHAs, IP blocking, proxies, session persistence, throttling, redirect loops, retries, and timeouts.
- Experience building high-load distributed systems with microservices, workers and queues, designed for fault tolerance and scalability.
- Confident with Postgres, Redis and NATS (or similar message brokers) in production.
- Experience automating complex multi-step flows, including signup, login, email confirmations, verification codes, magic links, and application submission journeys.
- Strong focus on security and data privacy (PII, tokens, encryption).
- Ability to design and document HTTP APIs (REST, Swagger / OpenAPI).
- Experience in fast-growing startups where autonomy and ownership are key.
- Background in systems sensitive to anti-fraud / anti-bot measures (fintech, ticketing, e-commerce, marketplaces, etc.).
- Experience with observability tooling: Prometheus / Grafana, ELK / OpenSearch, Sentry, etc.
- Understanding of ATS and job boards (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, SmartRecruiters, Indeed, LinkedIn, etc.).
- Market-level compensation
- Office/hybrid in Warsaw or fully remote from nearby time zones (CET ±2).
- 20 paid working days of vacation per year + 5 sick leaves.
Dear Candidates, due to a high volume of applications, only selected candidates will be contacted for interviews. We appreciate your understanding. Thank you for considering a career with us.
- Work type
- Full-time
- Location
- Remote