Senior Backend Engineer for proxy and unblocking

Apify is the largest marketplace of tools for AI. 25,000 Actors helping people and agents get real-time web data, track competitors, generate leads, or integrate their apps. Actors are built by a global creator community that now earns more than $1M every month. 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/. To support this mission, we're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to work on proxy infrastructure and unblocking. Anti-bot systems are constantly evolving, and we need to keep our scraping infrastructure ahead of them. You'll expand Apify Proxy, research anti-scraping services, and build internal tools that use browser fingerprinting, human-like interactions, and session management to keep data flowing. If you enjoy solving hard technical problems and contributing to open-source proxy libraries, this role might be for you. WHAT YOU'LL BE WORKING ON: - Building robots that behave and act like real users to automate human activities on the web - Working in a small cross-functional team with other experienced hackers - Expanding the capabilities of Apify Proxy, adding more protocols and more underlying providers, and implementing internal unblocking capabilities - Researching existing anti-scraping services and implementing new internal services to overcome them by utilizing various browser fingerprinting methods, human-like browser interaction, session management, and others - Contributing to proxy-chain https://github.com/apify/proxy-chain and impit https://github.com/apify/impit, our open-source libraries for proxy handling and request impersonation OUR TECH STACK: - Infra: AWS Compute (Kubernetes (EKS), EC2, Lambda), Helm, Terraform, CloudFormation, ArgoCD, MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB, S3, GitHub Actions - Monitoring: Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Mezmo, Sentry, PagerDuty - Frontend: React.js, styled-components, Storybook, Chromatic, Cypress, Playwright - Backend: TypeScript/Node.js, Nest.js, Next.js, Docusaurus, Vitest - Tools: GitHub, Notion, Google Workspace, Slack - OS, code editor, and AI assistant of your choice (Claude premium with unlimited tokens, GH Copilot, Cursor, Gemini, or JetBrains AI) - Process: two-week sprints, code reviews, tests, automating whatever we can, and deploying multiple times per day. WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR: - A strong technical background or great professional track record (we're looking for exceptional candidates, no matter the seniority) - 2+ years of industry experience building proxy, fingerprinting, or unblocking services - Strong skills in developing and debugging with TypeScript/Node.js, or equivalent skills in another language and the ability to learn quickly - Familiarity with Linux - Experience with AWS, other public clouds, or any technology mentioned above (nice to have) - An experiment-driven and collaborative mindset - Good communication skills in English WHY SHOULD YOU WORK AT APIFY? - Space, support, and autonomy for personal growth, with a direct impact on Apify's success - Full-time position in Prague (Lucerna Palace) or Brno (Titanium) 🏰 - Option to work remotely 🛋️ - Flexible working hours (perfect for both night owls 🦉 and early birds 🐥) - Nobody counts holidays as long as the work gets done 💪 - Unlimited Claude for every Apifier. We don't count tokens. Just use them well 🤖 - Stock options and profit sharing 💰 - We welcome pets, kids, and bikes at the office 🐕👨‍👧 - Epic team buildings and offsites 🚢 with biking, canoeing, and other adventures 🪂 - Solid education and training budget, conference tickets, internal “Eat & Learn” sessions, and the possibility to work across teams 👩🏼‍💻👨🏽‍💻 - Generous hardware budget 💻 - Free lunches every day when you're in the office 🌮🍱🍜🍕🥡 - Unlimited supply of ☕ & 🍺 and snacks - Free entry to the wonderful Prague Zoo 🐘 - Free Multisport card 🏋 - Ping-pong, chess, PS5, lightsabers, foosball league after lunch. For more details about Apify and what it is like to work with us, see our Careers page https://apify.com/jobs.