Apify is the marketplace of ready-to-run tools for AI that automate work on the web. Thousands of Actors get web data, generate leads, monitor social media, track competitors, and integrate with existing apps and agents. Actors are created by a global community of builders who earn from them, while Apify manages infrastructure, billing, and distribution. Learn more at apify.com.

Join us to help people put the web to work. Apify can find missing children, protect consumers from fake discounts across the EU, and feed data to AI chatbots.

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join a small, cross-functional team of experienced hackers building and scaling some of Apify Store’s most popular Actors. You'll push these products forward with new features and new approaches, including AI, build the internal tooling that makes other engineering teams faster, and mentor junior engineers as they grow into independent web automation engineers.

What you'll be working on

Building and scaling cloud programs (Actors) that crawl and extract data reliably under real-world load

Pushing some of the most popular Actors in Apify Store forward: coming up with new features, trying new approaches (including AI), and shaping where these products go next, while making sure they stay fast and reliable for the thousands of users who depend on them

Working on internal projects and tooling that make other teams at Apify faster, from shared libraries and AI-powered tools to building blocks other engineers rely on every day. AI is changing how web automation gets built, so you'll put it to work day to day and help keep improving how the team works with it.

Writing clean, elegant code, and keeping it that way through reviews and refactoring

Reverse-engineering how websites work behind the scenes, and designing APIs other developers love to use

Mentoring junior engineers on the team: reviewing their code, pairing with them on complex challenges, and helping them grow into independent web automation engineers.

Owning the design of the Actors and tools you build, and making sure they fit well with the rest of the team's codebase

How we work

Built on our own tools: We use TypeScript, and the core building blocks are libraries we develop and open source ourselves: Crawlee for crawling and scraping, and the Apify SDK for running on the platform.

Unblocking: Getting past anti-bot protection is a core part of the job, and we build our own tools for it. These include tools for browser-like HTTP requests, realistic browser fingerprints, and Apify Proxy with datacenter and residential IPs. You’ll use them, improve them, and help shape what we build next.

AI-first engineering: Most of our code starts with an agent. We use Claude Code to explore unknown websites, prototype scrapers, write tests, and review PRs, which frees our time for the hard parts: architecture, anti-bot strategy, and making things reliable at scale. You stay in charge and you own every line that ships.

Who we're looking for

Must-haves

You're strong in JavaScript and TypeScript (Node.js) and have a solid understanding of web technologies.

You have 3+ years of professional or open source experience on a non-trivial project built with a team.

You treat code quality, readability, and frequent refactoring as part of getting the job done, not an afterthought.

You already use AI tools in your work and know where they help and where they don’t. You treat getting good at them as part of staying a strong engineer.

You have an appetite to keep learning, in web scraping and beyond.

You care about good design: you can weigh trade-offs and structure code so it stays maintainable as it grows.

You communicate clearly in English, in writing and in speech.

Nice-to-haves

Experience with web scraping.

A track record of contributing to non-trivial, user-facing products, open source or otherwise.

A habit of writing and sharing what you learn, through tutorials, technical support, or tooling.

By the end of the first month, we expect you to

Understand how Actors are built, deployed, and run on the Apify platform, and ship your first small fix or improvement to an existing Actor.