Born out of the heart of the Basque Country in Bilbao, ZenRows is one of the fastest-growing startups in Europe! We work 100% remotely and believe in hiring the best people, no matter where you are in the world!
Founded in 2021, our mission is to transform the future of data workflows by enabling seamless, large-scale data extraction from the web. With our powerful tools, businesses can automate data collection at scale while leveraging the most advanced anti-bot bypass system on the market. Thousands of companies worldwide - across industries like e-commerce, real estate, finance, and AI - rely on ZenRows to streamline their data pipelines, fueling automation, analytics, and AI-driven insights. As we continue our rapid expansion, we’re looking for a highly experienced Senior Software Engineer to lead the design and evolution of our asynchronous processing systems.
About the Role:
You will own critical infrastructure components that ingest, enrich, and route billions of data points — ensuring performance, reliability, and horizontal scalability. Your work will directly impact throughput, customer SLAs, billing accuracy, and platform reliability.
As a Senior Engineer, you'll operate at the intersection of deep system design, hands-on implementation, and technical leadership. You’ll collaborate with Infrastructure and Product teams to design fault-tolerant, observable, and cost-efficient systems that support our distributed workloads.
We’re a remote-first company with a fast-paced, high-impact culture. In this role, you’ll work closely with our CEO, Aurken, and our Director of Engineering. And as a business with two technical founders who have strong engineering backgrounds—you must be comfortable engaging in technical discussions while balancing business needs.
Key Responsibilities:
⚙️ Systems Design & Architecture
- Design and evolve our job processing architecture to handle millions of concurrent async tasks reliably.
- Architect pipelines that support retry strategies, dynamic task routing, prioritization, rate limiting, and idempotency at scale.
- Drive the design of scheduling systems for recurring or trigger-based workflows (cron, event-based, user-initiated).
- Build systems that support both real-time and batch data processing use cases with observability built in.
🧵 Deep Ownership of Core Systems
- Own end-to-end lifecycle of background workers, queues, schedulers, and task orchestration logic.
- Improve the resilience and self-healing capacity of async workflows
- Drive capacity planning, performance tuning, and operational efficiency (latency, throughput, infra cost).
📊 Observability, Reliability & Operations
- Define SLAs and reliability goals for job processing and scheduling systems.
- Build dashboards and alerting for job failures, stuck queues, throughput anomalies, and retry storms.
- Lead incident response and root cause analysis when async systems are involved.
- Enable dynamic scaling and distributed execution across regions/clouds.
🧠 Technical Leadership
- Set technical direction for how we process, prioritize, and schedule work internally.
- Mentor senior engineers and contribute to elevating engineering standards and architecture reviews.
- Drive adoption of best practices around event-driven systems, queueing strategies, and fault-tolerant design.
The Person:
We’re looking for a pragmatic, systems-level engineer who has been in the trenches building reliable infrastructure that supports billions of events, jobs, or messages per day. You're fluent in both code and architecture diagrams, and obsessed with making distributed systems observable, testable, and fast.
Key Skills and Experience:
- Have 6+ years of backend and infrastructure engineering experience, with at least 2 years working on large-scale async job systems, task queues, or pipelines.
- Have deep expertise in queueing systems like Celery, Sidekiq, BullMQ, SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Google Pub/Sub.
- Have designed or operated distributed schedulers (e.g., Airflow, Temporal, Argo, custom systems).
- Know how to make asynchronous systems idempotent, traceable, and fault-tolerant.
- Understand retry strategies (exponential backoff, circuit breakers), deduplication, and concurrency control.
- Are comfortable operating at scale — tens of millions of tasks/day, across shards, nodes, or cloud regions.
- Write clean, maintainable code in Python, Go, Node, or similar backend language.
- Think in systems — how jobs affect SLAs, billing, retries, rate limits, and customer experience.
- You have world-class product sense and can prioritize engineering efforts based on business impact.
- Communicate clearly, document thoroughly, and guide complex decisions across teams.
- Are familiar with time-series monitoring, metrics, tracing, and log pipelines (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, etc.)
Bonus Points If You
- Have experience with multi-cloud deployment strategies.
- Have previously built your own workflow engine, job scheduler, or orchestration system.
- Can share war stories from scaling task systems or fixing nightmare-level production incidents — and what you learned.
Agile & Process-Driven Mindset
- You optimize workflows, reduce bottlenecks, and improve efficiency without overcomplicating processes.
- You understand the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) and prioritize high-impact work over perfection.
- You are used to working with multidisciplinary teams and balancing engineering, business, and product needs.
Strong Product & Business Awareness
Transparency & Collaboration
- You thrive in open, honest communication and ensure visibility across teams.
- You can handle strong opinions from technical founders and have the guts to say no when needed, while gathering input from multiple stakeholders
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
Why you will love working here…
- We have a CEO who values world-class talent over everything else. Trust and respect are earned, and with them come reward and recognition like nowhere else.
- In a world where it feels like everyone is being called back to being in an office, we operate a truly 100% remote approach that allows you to work from anywhere you choose.
Forget Agile, Scrum, Lean... or whatever development methodology is trendy this week. We give you a horizontal view that enables you to identify where you think you can contriute the most.
We have fun! The above may sound like we are all about work, but we put a lot of focus on ensuring our culture is one that our people enjoy, which lets you build lasting friendships and grow both personally and professionally.
