Senior Software Engineer - Web Scraping Specialist

Sonalake is a software partnering company that helps our clients realise their product roadmaps. Product design and engineering are at the heart of our business. Our engineering teams work with clients right across the stack; UX, UI design, frontend, backend, analytics, infrastructure, operations - and everything else that goes into delivering great products.

We thrive on variety and are highly adaptable. Our teams are exposed to domains as varied as telecom billing, ad tech, securities-based lending, travel tech analytics, and many more.

Innovation is central to our mission; anticipating future client needs, analysing emerging technologies and developing new products and services.

We are now seeking to grow our backend data extraction (web crawlers, ingestion services etc.) team. That’s where you come in!

You will

be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining web scraping processes to gather data from various online sources efficiently and accurately. This role demands technical expertise in backend development and experience with leading technical projects.

• Design and implement effective web scraping strategies to extract data from targeted websites. Incorporate data cleansing and validation logic into the framework to uphold data integrity and accuracy.
• Optimize services for efficiency and scalability, especially when dealing with a large volume of data or multiple data sources.
• Stay up-to-date with legal and ethical considerations related to web scraping, including website terms of service, copyright, and privacy regulations.
• Research and nominate appropriate tools, libraries, frameworks etc. for technical project designs based on factors such as performance, reliability, cost.
• Engage with cross-functional teams and product management to gather requirements and generate ideas for improvements.
• Drive complex projects with contributions from multiple engineers.
• Mentor engineers and develop their performance through code/design reviews and providing technical direction.
• Champion continual process and practice improvement to ensure efficient and high-quality software delivery.

You may be a fit for this role if you

• 8+ years of relevant experience in backend development, demonstrating deep expertise in writing efficient, clean, and maintainable code.
• Proficiency in Python is a must have.
• Knowledge and experience in best of class data storage and retrieval of large volumes of scraped data.
• Understanding of web scraping best practices, including handling dynamic content, user-agent rotation, and IP address management.
• Proven ability in scaling and maintaining backend components in a production environment.
• Experience with containerized deployments (docker, kubernetes, terraform etc.) and cloud computing (AWS is a plus).
• Conversant with continuous integration, continuous deployment, and test driven development practices.
• Demonstrated experience in mentoring and coaching engineers, fostering their professional growth and enhancing team performance.
• Exceptional problem-solving skills and good project management capabilities.
• Outstanding communication and collaboration skills.

What's in it for you?

• Remote-first approach with many team-building activities. You can work from our offices in Dublin, Poznan or Bratislava, or work on a fully remote or hybrid basis. We believe in a healthy work-life balance
• Every Sonalaker gets a training budget and paid training days every year to upskill. This covers courses, training, books or conferences
• We’ve a flat organisational structure with an emphasis on open, honest communication. There are no siloes, no hierarchies and no barriers
• We focus on innovation: we run projects to evaluate new frameworks, create tools for internal use, contribute to the open source community and research new ways to use existing products in new problem domains
• Indefinite period employment contract

We take pride in being a people-oriented company. Openness and opportunity are really important to us. We build teams that span from experienced leaders to bright graduates and work to develop all of us within our coaching culture.