Anti-Bot Engineer

SearchApi, LLC; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully Remote Work

Equity share

Profit sharing

Learn fast

Annual team retreats

Job summary

SearchApi is seeking a highly skilled engineer to advance anti-bot evasion. You will research, reverse engineer, and bypass sophisticated bot detection while improving internal tooling and stealth configurations. You’ll analyze traffic, document findings, and push the boundaries of web scraping capabilities.

Remote role with ownership to define the work, collaborate with a lean team, and ship real products at scale for Fortune 500 and startup customers.

Qualifications

• Fluent in English, written and spoken.
• BSc or higher in CS or equivalent technical field.
• Deep experience with Playwright, Puppeteer, or Selenium internals.
• Experience bypassing at least one major anti-bot system (Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, PerimeterX, etc.).
• Network traffic analysis (Wireshark, Burp Suite, mitmproxy, or similar).
• TLS and protocol fingerprinting experience (JA3, JA4, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 over QUIC).
• WebRTC fingerprinting and evasion.
• Chromium or Firefox source code familiarity.
• Experience at scale handling millions of requests.
• Contributions to open-source evasion tools.

Responsibilities

• Research and implement anti-bot evasion techniques.
• Reverse engineer bot detection systems and bypass them.
• Debug TLS and protocol fingerprinting and push the QUIC frontier.
• Optimize Playwright/Puppeteer configurations for stealth.
• Analyze network traffic to understand detection mechanisms.
• Build internal tools for testing evasion techniques.
• Stay ahead of latest bot-detection developments.
• Document findings and share knowledge with the team.

Education

BSc or higher in CS or equivalent technical field

Tools

Playwright

Puppeteer

Selenium

Wireshark

Burp Suite

mitmproxy

Proxyman

AWS

Job description

Be part of our team

Success comes from our dedicated team building top-quality product.

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Remote

Department

About SearchApi

SearchApi is a real-time SERP API delivering structured data from 100+ search engines and sources, including Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Jobs, Bing, Baidu, YouTube, Amazon, and many more. We power production workloads for Fortune 500 companies and fast-moving startups who need reliable search data at scale.

We're a lean, profitable, bootstrapped team. No VC pressure, no bloat. Just engineers shipping real products to real customers.

The hardest problems. Anti-bot systems evolve constantly. You'll be at the cutting edge of evasion techniques.

Real impact. When you break through a protection, thousands of customers benefit immediately.

Fortune 500 Customers. Our API powers production workloads, not just experiments.

Bootstrapped and Profitable. We answer to customers, not investors.

We are searching for grinders who take ownership and move fast. You'll work on the hardest technical challenges in web scraping.

Playwright, Puppeteer, raw CDP

Ruby, Node.js, or Python for tooling

Network analysis tools (Wireshark, Burp Suite, Proxyman)

AWS infrastructure

Ruby on Rails familiarity is a plus (we use it for internal tools)

We use Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub, and Slack daily. We ship multiple times a day with CI/CD.

We ship faster because we use AI tools aggressively. Cursor and Claude. But you own the output. If you can't evaluate what AI produces, you're not ready for this role.

What You’ll Do

Research and implement anti-bot evasion techniques.

Reverse engineer bot detection systems. Understand how they work, then bypass them.

Debug TLS and protocol fingerprinting (JA3, JA4, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 over QUIC, header order and casing), and push the QUIC frontier where most detection and most scrapers haven't caught up yet.

Optimize Playwright/Puppeteer configurations for stealth.

Analyze network traffic to understand detection mechanisms.

Build internal tools for testing and validating evasion techniques.

Stay ahead of the latest developments in bot detection.

Document findings and share knowledge with the team.

You define the work. We don't have a task list for this role. You tell us what you'll work on based on what's broken, what's getting detected, and where you see opportunities. This is how much control you'll have.

The Hard Parts

This role is not for everyone. Here's what makes it hard:

Cat and mouse game. What works today might not work tomorrow. You need to constantly adapt.

Deep debugging. Sometimes you'll spend days figuring out why a single request gets blocked.

Ambiguity. Anti-bot systems don't publish their detection methods. You reverse engineer and experiment.

Pressure. When a major protection changes and customers are affected, you need to fix it fast.

Lonely expertise. Few people understand this domain deeply. You'll often be figuring things out alone.

If you want clear specifications and predictable work, this isn't for you.

Obsessed with evasion. You've spent your own time trying to bypass protections. You find it fun.

Hacker mindset. You enjoy reverse engineering and figuring out how systems work.

Persistent. You don't give up when something doesn't work. You try another approach.

Great writer. You document your findings clearly so others can learn.

Self-directed. You don't need someone to assign tasks. You find the next problem to solve.

Fluent in English, written and spoken.

BSc or higher in CS or equivalent technical field.

Required experience:

Deep experience with Playwright, Puppeteer, or Selenium internals.

Experience bypassing at least one major anti-bot system (Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, PerimeterX, etc.).

Network traffic analysis (Wireshark, Burp Suite, mitmproxy, or similar).

We're especially looking for:

TLS and protocol fingerprinting experience (JA3, JA4, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 over QUIC).

WebRTC fingerprinting and evasion.

Chromium or Firefox source code familiarity.

Experience at scale handling millions of requests.

Contributions to open-source evasion tools.

What We Look For

What makes a strong application:

Tell us about the hardest anti-bot system you've bypassed. What was the detection method? How did you figure it out? What was your solution? We want specifics, not generics.

Signals we look for:

Personal projects in this space. Blog posts about evasion techniques. Open-source contributions to stealth tools. Evidence you've done this before, not just read about it.

45-minute interview call. Discuss your experience with anti-bot systems.

Take-home challenge. Realistic evasion problem.

Technical interview. 60 minutes, go deep on techniques and approaches.

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. Work on some of the hardest problems in web scraping.
• Annual team retreats (last one in Spain).

Our Values

Remote Only

Work from anywhere. We believe in flexibility and trust.

Open Source

Be part of a team that values opensource and giving back to the community.

Transparency

We prioritize open communication and clear processes at every level.

The Rails Way

Prioritize programmer happiness and simplicity.

Managers of One

We trust our team members to take ownership and lead projects.

Developer Experience

Simple APIs, clear documentation and easy integration.