Backend Engineer (Data Acquisition) - (Anti-Scam 2B Team)

Role Overview:
As a Backend Engineer (Data Acquisition) on the Anti-Scam 2B team, you will own and evolve Gogolook's web data acquisition infrastructure — the backbone that powers our Watchmen brand-protection platform. You'll tackle one of our most critical cost-and-capability challenges: replacing high-cost crawler dependencies with an in-house, scalable, cost-efficient crawling fleet that supports real-time social media monitoring, fraud signal extraction, and threat intelligence enrichment. This role requires deep crawler expertise and a high degree of independence. As the team's first dedicated crawler specialist, you'll have the ownership to set the technical direction and build the capability for long-term scale.

What You'll Work On:
In the next 6–12 months, your primary mission will be to replace the existing Watchmen crawler dependencies with a purpose-built, in-house crawling system, dramatically reducing operational costs while improving coverage, freshness, and reliability. Beyond the initial migration, you'll expand crawler coverage to new social platforms and fraud signals, build extraction pipelines that feed into Gogolook's fraud database, and develop reusable crawling infrastructure that serves the company's broader B2B product roadmap and AI/ML detection initiatives.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate scalable, production-grade web crawling infrastructure across social media platforms and public web sources, with a focus on reliability, coverage, and cost efficiency.
• Build resilient collection mechanisms, including headless browser orchestration, IP rotation, scheduling, rate limiting, retry logic, observability, and automated recovery.
• Own data extraction and normalization pipelines that transform crawled content into structured fraud signals for downstream detection and database enrichment.
• Drive the migration from external crawler dependencies to cost-efficient in-house solutions, continuously optimizing infrastructure cost, performance, and architecture.
• Collaborate with backend, data, and product teams to integrate crawler outputs into Watchmen and broader fraud intelligence systems, while proactively improving technical quality and reducing technical debt.
• Partner with Legal and Security to ensure data acquisition practices meet applicable compliance, privacy, retention, and auditability requirements.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Demonstrated production experience building crawlers at scale — including resilient collection techniques, headless browser orchestration (Playwright, Puppeteer, or equivalent), large-scale URL scheduling, and structured data extraction pipelines.
• Deep proficiency in HTTP and TLS protocol internals — including the ability to analyze bot-detection signals and build resilient collection systems against mechanisms.
• Proficiency in Python and JavaScript.
• Solid experience with AWS cloud infrastructure (EC2, ECS, Lambda, S3, or equivalent).
• Strong ownership mindset — operates independently, raises issues proactively, and drives work to completion with minimal supervision.
• 3–7 years of software engineering experience with a focus on data acquisition or backend systems.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Codex) as part of daily development workflow.
• Effective collaborator across functions and comfortable working in a hybrid environment.
• Working proficiency in written English, with the ability to read and write technical documentation.