Why Join Zyte?
At Zyte, we don’t just extract web data—we tackle some of the internet’s trickiest data collection challenges at a massive scale. We’re a globally distributed team of bold, curious problem-solvers dedicated to delivering clean, reliable web data wherever it’s needed.
- We live and breathe data: We unlock access to open web data, helping everyone from scrappy startups to global enterprises power competitive intelligence, analytics, and cutting-edge AI models.
- Truly remote-first: Work from wherever you thrive. With more than 260 Zytans spread across 33 countries, our diversity is our greatest strength.
- Engineering excellence: We love rolling up our sleeves to dig into complex codebases, test out fresh technologies, and push technical limits. If you love creative problem-solving and delivering rock-solid production software, you’ll feel right at home here.
- Thoughtful architecture: We use a clear system design framework to balance functional needs with architectural trade-offs, making sure our decisions are smart and sustainable.
- Fascinating distributed systems: Solve unique engineering problems across custom networking, high-throughput streaming, and large-scale orchestration under real-world constraints.
- Real ownership: Work on a profitable, industry-leading platform that dedicatedly sets aside time and resources for architectural research and long-term feature design.
What Is This Role All About?
When Zyte API fetches web data, it works through a progressive ladder of routes: standard HTTP requests, headless browsers, and, for the toughest sites, Edge—our custom residential network of real physical devices. Edge is our heavy hitter when all else fails. It runs a Rust peer runtime on residential Windows PCs that long-polls our command-and-control service over mTLS gRPC, making fetches look indistinguishable from real human traffic using genuine hardware, residential IPs, and seamless fingerprints.
Our Edge Platform squad manages both the control plane and data plane of this stack. Right now, we’re expanding from Windows into Android devices on mobile networks and self-hosted Linux (with macOS on the horizon). Mobile is where our biggest opportunity lies: websites that block desktop traffic often welcome a real mobile phone on a 4G connection. That’s where you come in! You’ll be the lead engineer making our peer run smoothly and invisibly across every platform—binding Rust to native network stacks and OS APIs via FFI, and turning scattered devices into a well-oiled, observable fleet. We’re a lean, senior team, so you’ll collaborate closely with our Team Lead, Principal Engineer, and the Browser Stack and Antiban squads.
Requirements
What You’ll Be Doing
- Build our cross-platform peer runtime: Take ownership of the Rust peer binary across Windows, Android, Linux (and eventually macOS)—handling process lifecycles, background tasks, networking, automatic updates, and rock-solid stability on unmanaged hardware.
- Bring Edge to mobile platforms: Port our peer to Android using NDK/JNI, navigating foreground services, battery optimizations, and mobile network quirks to integrate real and emulated device farms into our fleet.
- Master the FFI boundary: Integrate the Chromium network stack (Cronet, C++) and browserless HTTP clients into the peer as clean, well-tested Rust libraries with safe runtime contracts.
- Harness hardware signals: Gather deep hardware and OS reconnaissance from the fleet—mapping TCP/TLS/HTTP fingerprints—and share insights with our Browser and Antiban teams so our emulated tiers stay realistic.
- Make the fleet transparent: Build precise per-device metrics around uptime, drop-off rates, bandwidth, and success rates so we can hold ourselves and supply partners accountable.
- Expand edge capabilities: Add peer-level support for new tasks like captcha solving and browser rendering, while keeping the peer securely isolated from untrusted pages and hosts.
- Share production responsibility: Join our team on-call rotation, run thoughtful post-mortems, and transform real-world lessons into software and deployment improvements.
- Raise the engineering bar: Author RFDs, review architectural designs, and set the gold standard for how cross-platform Rust is built and delivered at Zyte.
Who You Are
- 5+ years of production Rust experience, with a proven track record of shipping and maintaining software end-to-end.
- Cross-platform Rust expertise: You’ve shipped Rust code on at least two platforms across Windows, macOS, or Android (with at least one mobile platform under your belt). You understand the intricacies of OS permissions, processes, and background behavior.
- Comfortable with FFI: Skilled in interfacing Rust with C/C++ libraries and native OS APIs (JNI/NDK, Win32, POSIX), including managing lifetimes, memory ownership, and cross-language threading.
- Deep networking knowledge: Thorough understanding of TCP, TLS, and HTTP protocols down to the packet level; you know how to dissect network traffic and analyze why client fingerprints differ.
- Reliability-first mindset: You instrument everything you build, know how to measure fleet health without direct device access, and take pride in on-call operational excellence.
- Security-conscious: You recognize that running code on third-party devices requires high trust and rigorous defensive design.
- Great async communicator: Excellent written communication skills suited for a distributed, remote-first team.
- Incurably curious: You enjoy reverse engineering protocols, exploring new binaries, and figuring out how complex systems truly work under the hood.
Our Tech Stack
- Languages: Rust (tokio, tonic), C++ (Cronet), Kotlin/Java on Android.
- Platforms: Windows today; Android (real and emulated) and Linux next; macOS coming soon.
- Protocols & Libraries: gRPC and Protobuf over mTLS, Chromium network stack, custom browserless HTTP clients, and custom Chromium builds.
- Infrastructure: GCP, Kubernetes, Valkey, BigQuery, blue/green deployments.
- Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry.
Nice-to-Haves
- Residential network experience: Building or running proxy networks, peer-to-peer applications, or device farms.
- Browser internals knowledge: Experience with Chromium, Cronet, Firefox networking, or anti-detection technologies.
- Distributed systems background: Designing schedulers, orchestrators, or control planes for large-scale fleets.
- Web scraping experience: Familiarity with the technical nuances and hurdles of web scraping at scale.
- Open source contributions: Active participation in Rust, networking, or mobile open-source communities.
Why You’ll Love Working Here
- Massive impact: Build the foundational device layer powering data pipelines for global industry leaders.
- Autonomy & flexibility: Enjoy true remote work with flexible hours and a high-trust, supportive environment.
- Continuous innovation: Solve cutting-edge technical problems at the intersection of AI and web data collection.
- Global collaboration: Work alongside talented, passionate systems engineers and data experts worldwide.
If you’re a Rust engineer who loves making software run reliably across unpredictable hardware and diverse platforms, we’d love to hear from you. Come help us shape the future of web data extraction at Zyte!
Benefits
By joining the Zyte team, you will:
- Become part of a self-motivated, progressive, multi-cultural team
- Have the freedom and flexibility to work from where you do your best work
- Attend conferences and meet with team members from across the globe
- Work with cutting-edge open source technologies and tools
New Zealand