We are looking for a Director of R&D to take full ownership of the technology organization: the team, the architecture, the platform, and the technology direction. You will lead a small, senior engineering group and partner directly with the CEO and product to shape and deliver the roadmap.
This is a hands-on leadership role. You will be close to the systems and the code, and you will be the person we rely on to lead engineering through a period of fast growth.
Responsibilities:
Lead, mentor, and empower the team. Develop team leads and senior engineers, push ownership down, and grow the next layer of leadership from within.
Scale the organization with the business. Own hiring, structure, and process so the team can grow quickly without losing quality or velocity.
Own platform uptime and performance. Define and hold SLOs, and build the observability, on-call, and performance practices behind them.
Own architecture and technology direction. Extraction orchestration, the unblocker and anti-detection layer, proxy integration, and the infrastructure underneath, on a Node.js/TypeScript core.
Drive AI adoption in the product and in the team. Adaptive extraction, self-healing collectors, anomaly detection, and AI-assisted development as a default working practice.
Own execution end to end. Turn business priorities into a sequenced technical plan with the CEO and product, and hold the bar on quality, testing, and release discipline.
Own the engineering budget, including cloud and infrastructure cost, a first-order concern at our traffic volumes.
Requirements: 8+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years leading teams or an engineering group
A track record of developing engineers and team leads, not only shipping software
Experience scaling an engineering organization and its systems through fast growth
Hands-on depth in distributed, high-throughput systems
Demonstrated ownership of uptime and performance at scale, with real SLO and incident-response experience
Ownership of cloud and infrastructure cost as a business concern, not only a technical one
Practical adoption of AI in engineering practice and in product, with a clear view of where it helps and where it is noise
Strong communicator who operates credibly with the CEO, with product, and in front of customers
Nice to Have:
Background in web data extraction or crawling infrastructure
Experience with headless browser infrastructure at scale
Familiarity with proxy networks and network-level tooling
Working knowledge of fingerprinting and detection techniques, and how sites defend against non-human traffic
This position is open to all candidates.