Staff Software Engineer

ZenRows is one of Europe's fastest-growing startups, providing infrastructure for data extraction from the web. The Staff Software Engineer will own critical infrastructure components, ensuring performance and reliability while collaborating on system design and technical leadership.

Responsibilities:

• Own the availability and success rate of the scraping API — the core product metric
• Drive architectural improvements that increase throughput and reduce failure rates across diverse target sites
• Design systems that degrade gracefully, self-heal, and adapt to shifting detection patterns without human intervention
• Design and evolve the async execution architecture that processes millions of concurrent tasks across nodes and regions
• Build robust retry strategies, idempotency, dynamic routing, rate limiting, and prioritization
• Own scheduling infrastructure for recurring, event-driven, and user-triggered workflows
• Define and enforce SLAs for both the scraping API and job processing systems
• Build alerting and dashboards for failure modes, success rate regressions, throughput anomalies, and retry storms
• Lead incident response and post-mortems; participate in on-call responsibilities for the systems you own
• Contribute meaningfully to architecture decisions — not just implementation
• Raise the bar in design reviews and engineering standards across the team
• Mentor peers and drive adoption of sound distributed systems practices

Requirements:

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, with meaningful time spent building and operating high-throughput, high-availability distributed systems
• Strong fundamentals in concurrency, fault tolerance, consistency models, and systems design
• Hands-on experience with queueing and messaging systems (SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub, BullMQ, or similar)
• Comfortable operating at scale — tens of millions of requests or events per day, across multiple nodes or regions
• Solid production instincts: you think about retries, deduplication, backpressure, and observability before writing the first line
• Clean, maintainable code in Go (or a comparable backend language)
• Experience with distributed tracing, metrics, and logging (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or equivalent)
• Clear communicator — you can drive a technical debate and explain complex tradeoffs to non-engineers alike
• Experience with browser automation at scale (Playwright, Puppeteer, or similar)
• Familiarity with proxy infrastructure, TLS fingerprinting, or HTTP-level anti-bot patterns
• You've designed or operated a workflow engine, job scheduler, or orchestration system
• You have a war story from a system that broke badly in production — and clear lessons learned from it
• Multi-cloud deployment experience