Ruby Engineer - Web Scraping (Remote)
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SearchApi is a real-time SERP API that delivers structured search engine data from Google, Bing, Baidu, YouTube, Amazon, and more. We help developers, startups, and enterprises access reliable search data at scale.We are a bootstrapped, profitable, and fast-growing company, trusted by Fortune 500 companies and Y Combinator startups. Our team is small, highly technical, and remote-first.At SearchApi, we move fast, iterate quickly, and expect ownership and initiative from everyone. Engineers here work on browser automation, web scraping, high-performance APIs, and infrastructure scaling. We believe in solving hard problems with practical engineering—no unnecessary meetings, no corporate bureaucracy.If you enjoy building reliable systems, optimizing performance, and working with real-world web data challenges, you’ll fit right in.
About SearchApi
🎯 Why Join Us?
- Real Impact: Small team, massive scale. Your code runs in production serving billions of requests, powering tools you've probably used.
- 100+ APIs: Google, Bing, Baidu, YouTube, Amazon, and growing.
- Open Source First: LangChain, HayStack, Flowise, LangFlow, Dify integrations.
- Fortune 500 Customers: Our API powers production workloads, not just pilots and experiments.
- Bootstrapped and Profitable: We answer to customers, not investors.
🛡️ SearchApi Values
- We do everything the Rails Way. If you don't like DHH's style, this may not be the place for you.
- We embrace the one person framework.
- We hire Managers of One. We trust you to figure it out.
- Open Source contributor.
- Remote-only. Async-first. Results-driven.
- Transparency. No politics.
💻 Tech Stack
- Ruby on Rails 8.1
- Ruby 3.4
- Hotwire (Stimulus.JS + Turbo)
- TailwindCSS (TailwindUI components)
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Sidekiq
- Terraform + AWS
🤖 You Control AI, AI Doesn't Control You
💪 What You'll Do
- Fix broken parsers under time pressure.
- Add new elements to existing search engines.
- Build and ship new search engine integrations.
- Reverse engineer website protections and anti-bot systems.
- Debug browser automation issues (CDP, fingerprinting, evasion).
- Create and improve documentation pages.
- Develop landing pages and admin dashboard features.
- Review PRs and help test.
- Talk to customers directly. Help them figure things out, brainstorm solutions, identify what's missing. Learn the APIs and websites we scrape yourself so you can actually help.
- Rotate on customer support. Everyone does it, including senior engineers.
- Proactively update customers on progress and ship what they need.
- Improve browser automation and debug performance at scale.
- Optimize concurrency: fibers, ractors, threads.
- Handle complex challenges: TLS fingerprinting, JA3, WebRTC, CDP internals.
- Improve API monitoring: logging, real-time analytics, anomaly detection.
- Architect and build new systems from scratch.
- Lead technical decisions and mentor engineers.
🔥 The Hard Parts
- Things break without warning. Search engines change layouts, anti-bot systems evolve, proxies fail. You'll debug production issues under pressure.
- No hand-holding. We don't assign tasks or write detailed specs. You identify problems and fix them.
- Customer-facing. You'll rotate on support. You'll talk to customers. You'll ship what they need and tell them when it's done.
- Small team, big scope. There's no one to hand things off to. You own it end-to-end.
- Written communication is everything. Remote-first means if you can't write clearly, you'll struggle.
- Fast pace. We ship daily. We expect results, not activity.
✨ About You
- Grinder. You don't wait for instructions. You find work that matters and do it.
- Results-driven. You ship. You measure. You iterate.
- Great writer. Code, PRs, docs, customer messages. Writing is thinking.
- Strong work ethic. Startup pace. We work hard because that's how you win against incumbents.
- Specialist with range. We need depth in hard technical areas: CDP, anti-bot, concurrency, browser internals. You can collaborate across the stack, but you go deep where it matters.
- Passionate about Ruby & Ruby on Rails.
- Deep knowledge of web fundamentals: HTTP, TLS, CSS selectors, XPath, JavaScript.
- Experience with browser automation, scraping, and data extraction.
- Fluent in English, written and spoken.
- BSc or higher in CS or equivalent technical field. We're building developer tools, strong technical foundations matter.
- CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol) specialists.
- Anti-bot and evasion experts (Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, PerimeterX).
- Concurrency experts: fibers, ractors, threads in Ruby.
- Browser automation engineers (Puppeteer, Playwright internals).
- Network debugging (Wireshark, Burp Suite, Proxyman).
- TLS/JA3/WebRTC fingerprinting experience.
- Infrastructure: Terraform, AWS/ECS, Prometheus, Grafana.
- Experience at scale: billions of requests.
🔍 What We Look For
🛠️ Hiring Process
- 45-minute interview call. Get to know each other, discuss experience.
- Take-home coding challenge. 1-4 hours, realistic problem. 5-day deadline.
- Technical interview. 60 minutes, discuss your solution and go deeper.
- Meet the team. 30 minutes.
- Reference check + Offer
🎁 What You Get
- 🏡 Fully Remote. Work from anywhere.
- 📈 Equity share. Own a piece of what you're building.
- 💵 Profit sharing. When we win, you win.
- 🧠 Learn fast. Touch every part of a growing SaaS. Wear multiple hats. Ship real products to real customers.
- 🏝️ Annual team retreats (last one in Spain).