Job Description
About Us:
At Zyte, we eat data for breakfast and you can eat your breakfast anywhere and work for Zyte. Founded in 2010, we are a globally distributed team of over 250 Zytans working from over 28 countries who are on a mission to enable our customers to extract the data they need to continue to innovate and grow their businesses. We believe that all businesses deserve a smooth pathway to data.
For over a decade, Zyte has led the way in building powerful, easy-to-use tools to collect, format, and deliver web data, quickly, dependably, and at scale. And today, the data we extract helps thousands of organizations make smarter business decisions, secure competitive advantage, and drive sustainable growth. Today, over 3,000 companies and 1 million developers rely on our tools and services to get the data they need from the web.
About the Role:
We are looking for an experienced Edge Platform Team Lead to drive Zyte’s strategic initiative to run browsers on Edge devices. The Edge Platform Squad builds and operates browsers that power undetectable web access across cloud and edge devices. This includes engineering Zyte’s end-to-end browser technology — from a custom Chromium deployed on cloud infrastructure to cross-platform browser agents running on edge devices — delivering undetectable and scalable infrastructure that enables reliable access to the most hard-to-reach data.
As the Team Lead, you will be both a hands-on technical contributor and a people leader, guiding a distributed squad of engineers through complex systems challenges at the intersection of browser engineering, anti-bot evasion, networking, and distributed systems.
What You Will Do:
- Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of 5–7 engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and technical excellence.
- Own the technical direction and delivery roadmap for the Edge Platform, including sprint planning, backlog prioritization, and cross-squad coordination with other platform engineering teams.
- Develop and maintain a cross-platform browser-agent application for Windows, macOS, and Android that runs on millions of devices.
- Operate and evolve a large-scale gateway that connects to millions of peer devices, including node scheduling, sharding, and allocation strategies.
- Build advanced stealth capabilities into the browser-agent SDK and a custom Chromium build to evade difficult antibot-protected websites, continuously identifying and eliminating bot-detection surfaces.
- Develop and maintain the browser-rendering service and browser-stack microservice consumed by the API squad, providing a robust interface for routing requests.
- Keep the custom Chromium branch current with every official release cycle.
- Provide a sandboxed runtime for product teams to deploy site-specific logic, and support the CDP proxy layer for integration with headless browser frameworks (Selenium, Puppeteer, Playwright).
- Drive architectural decisions through RFDs (Requests for Discussion).
- Own KPIs related to antiban success rates, website coverage, and system reliability; report on team performance against defined deliverables.
- Collaborate with Product, QA, and DevOps stakeholders to ensure quality, observability, and operational readiness of all Edge services.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a team lead or tech lead role managing distributed engineering teams.
- Strong systems programming skills in one or more of: C++ or Rust, with experience building high-load, latency-sensitive services.
- Strong understanding of networking protocols (HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebSockets, TLS) and network programming.
- Strong knowledge of event-driven and asynchronous programming patterns (event loop, futures, reactor patterns).
- Proficiency with containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms (GCP, AWS).
- Excellent communication skills in English and experience leading remote-first, globally distributed teams.
- Computer Science degree or equivalent working experience.
Bonus points for:
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, observability tools, and operational best practices for production services.
- Experience with distributed systems architecture: command-and-control patterns, peer-to-peer networking, node scheduling, and sharding.
- Hands-on experience with Chromium development, building custom browser forks, or contributing to browser engine projects.
- Experience with win32 API
- Experience with cross-platform desktop or mobile application development (Windows, macOS, Android).
- Deep knowledge of browser internals, the Chromium codebase, or browser automation frameworks (Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium, CDP).
- Knowledge of anti-bot detection systems and evasion techniques (fingerprinting, TLS signatures, behavioral analysis).
- Experience with web scraping or web data extraction at scale.
- Familiarity with the Quiche networking library or custom networking stacks.
- Apache Kafka or similar event streaming platforms experience.
- Track record of driving architectural decisions through RFC/RFD processes.
- History of open-source contributions.
By joining the Zyte team, you will:
- Become part of a self-motivated, progressive, multi-cultural team.
- Have the freedom & flexibility to work remotely.
- Get the chance to work with cutting-edge open source technologies and tools.
