Staff Engineer (Core & MLOps) - Remote

Why Zyte?

At Zyte, we don't just collect web data-we solve complex web data challenges at scale. We are a globally distributed team that is bold, curious, and dedicated to building innovative ways to deliver clean, reliable web data from across the internet.

• Data is our passion: We unlock access to open web data, empowering organizations-from startups to global enterprises-to power competitive intelligence, analytics, and AI pipelines.
• Remote-first culture: Work from anywhere in the world. With over 260 Zytans across 33 countries, our strength comes from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.
• Engineering excellence: We love diving deep into complex code bases, evaluating emerging technologies, and pushing technical boundaries. If you thrive on creative problem-solving and reliably delivering production-grade solutions, you will fit right in.
• Established system design framework: We systematically analyze functional and product requirements alongside architectural trade-offs to make informed, sustainable design decisions.
• Real-world distributed systems challenges: Tackle rare engineering problems in custom networking, high-throughput streaming, and large-scale orchestration under real-world operational constraints.
• Strong product ownership: Work on a profitable, market-leading platform with dedicated time and resources allocated for architectural research and strategic feature engineering.

Why This Role?

Zyte API powers a suite of Java and Python microservices running across multiple cloud providers and data centers. Every engineering team-spanning Core API, Browser, Edge, Antiban, AI, and Agentic products-relies on foundational infrastructure managed by our team: Kubernetes clusters, high-throughput Kafka pipelines, billing engines processing per-request metrics, and robust inter-service contracts.

We are evolving Zyte API into an automated software factory: a platform where developers and AI agents seamlessly create, validate, deploy, and maintain data extractors and workflows through governed interfaces. Two foundational layers drive this evolution. The control plane (service/schema registries, health-aware routing, automated canary releases) is actively under deployment. The context plane, which synthesizes observational signals to guide automated repair and optimizations, represents our next major design effort. As a Staff Engineer, you will own both architectures, setting the engineering standard for how services at Zyte are designed, built, and operated. You will be the technical lead in the Core & MLOps squad, collaborating closely with the Team Lead, Senior Engineers, DevOps, and QA, while directly influencing the release velocity and architecture of five neighboring squads.

What You'll Do

• Architect the control and context planes. Advance the control plane (service registry, schema registry, SLO enforcement, CLI tooling) into a robust production substrate. Design and build the context plane to aggregate operational signals-such as domain extraction histories, IP reputation scores, and BigQuery cost/performance telemetry-creating automated feedback loops between intent, execution, and self-healing maintenance.
• Own the service chassis and golden path. Maintain and refine multi-language client libraries (Java and Python), standardized workload specifications, Helm charts, and deployment pipelines, driving seamless adoption across all product teams.
• Define inter-service contracts. Establish gRPC and Protocol Buffer definitions, API gateway transcoding, versioning policies, and schema evolution rules to enable autonomous, safe deployments across teams.
• Operate the platform substrate. Partner with infrastructure engineers to run Kubernetes (across OCI, Hetzner, and GCP), Terraform, HAProxy/Nginx ingresses, Confluent Kafka, real-time event-billing pipelines, Valkey, and ongoing database modernizations (MySQL to PostgreSQL).
• Drive architectural strategy via RFDs. Lead Requests for Discussion (RFDs) on critical platform initiatives, including durable workflow orchestration (Temporal/DBOS), per-request gateway orchestration, multi-cluster routing, and automated failover.
• Institutionalize reliability engineering. Establish clear SLOs and error budgets for core capabilities, implementing health-aware traffic isolation and automated weighted canary deployments to eliminate manual release bottlenecks.
• Share production ownership. Participate in the shared infrastructure on-call rotation, lead incident post-mortems, and translate operational lessons into platform improvements.
• Elevate engineering standards. Mentor engineers across squads on distributed systems design, review system proposals, and establish intuitive best practices that make building reliable software effortless.

Who You Are

• 10+ years of experience building scalable distributed backend systems, with a proven track record of authoring internal platforms or core libraries widely adopted by engineering teams.
• Expertise in Java (using reactive frameworks like Vert.x or Netty) alongside strong proficiency in Python.
• Deep gRPC & Protobuf experience, with demonstrated success managing schema evolution and backward compatibility in mission-critical environments.
• Hands on infrastructure expertise with production Kubernetes at scale, Terraform, and event streaming with Kafka.
• Feedback loop designer: Experience designing automated telemetry pipelines, materialized views, or feature stores that dynamically adapt system behavior based on production data.
• Reliability mindset: Proven success defining SLOs/SLIs, analyzing blast radius, and designing fault tolerant systems built around rigorous service contracts.
• Technical leadership: Exceptional technical writing skills with the ability to articulate complex designs clearly and drive technical alignment across multi functional teams.
• Async communication: Strong interpersonal and written communication skills tailored for a globally distributed, remote first environment.
• Curious problem solver: Passionate about continuous learning and evaluating novel tools, architectures, and techniques.

Our Tech Stack

• Languages: Java 21, Python.
• Frameworks & Tools: Vert.x, Netty, gRPC and protobuf, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, CircleCI.
• Infrastructure: Multi cloud (OCI, GCP) and data centres (Hetzner, ), blue/green deployments everywhere.
• Data & Messaging: Confluent Kafka, BigQuery, Valkey, MySQL (Postgres next), HBase, Google Pub/Sub.
• Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry.

Bonus Points

• Durable execution engines: Hands on experience with Temporal, DBOS, or similar workflow platforms.
• MLOps: Experience in model serving, performance monitoring, and drift detection in production environments.
• Zero trust networking & service meshes: Familiarity with SPIRE, mTLS, Cilium, Istio, or Envoy.
• Developer tooling: Track record of building CLIs, SDKs, or project generators adopted across an engineering organization.
• Web scraping & crawling experience: Familiarity with the technical challenges of large scale web data extraction.
• Open source contributions: History of contributing to or maintaining open source projects in distributed systems or data extraction.

Why Join Us?

• Impact at scale: Architect core infrastructure powering web scale data pipelines for top-tier global enterprises.
• Autonomy and flexibility: Enjoy a genuine remote first culture with flexible working hours and high organizational trust.
• Continuous innovation: Solve emerging, complex technical challenges as AI and web data extraction rapidly evolve.
• Global community: Collaborate with a passionate, diverse team of distributed systems engineers and data specialists across the world.