Remote Senior Backend Engineer, Data Ingestion

People Data Labs; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

People Data Labs is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to help advance our data acquisition and processing platform. You will design and evolve backend services, build large-scale data pipelines, and apply web crawling techniques to expand our high-quality datasets.

You will work in a remote-first environment with a strong emphasis on ownership, collaboration, and learning. A background in data engineering, distributed systems, and API integration will help you contribute to impactful, scalable data

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience building or operating backend or infrastructure systems at scale.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or Rust, including async / await, coroutines, or concurrency frameworks.
• Strong grasp of software architecture including concurrency, scalability, and fault-tolerance considerations.
• Solid understanding of browser rendering pipeline and web application architecture (auth, cookies, http(s) requests).
• Familiarity with network architecture and debugging (HTTP, DNS, proxies, packet capture).
• Knowledge of distributed systems concepts: parallelism, asynchronous programming, backpressure, and message-driven design.
• Experience designing or maintaining data ingestion, API integration, or ETL systems.
• Proficiency with Linux/Unix command-line tools and system resource management.
• Experience with message queues and distributed task systems (Kafka, SQS, Airflow).
• Experience evaluating and monitoring data quality across releases.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the architecture and improvement of our data acquisition and processing platform, increasing reliability, throughput, and observability.
• Use and develop web crawling technologies to capture and catalog data on the internet.
• Build, operate, and evolve large-scale distributed systems that collect, process, and deliver data from across the web.
• Design and develop backend services that manage distributed job orchestration, data pipelines, and large-scale asynchronous workloads.
• Structure and model captured data, ensuring high quality and consistency across datasets.
• Continuously improve the speed, scalability, and fault-tolerance of our ingestion systems.
• Partner with data product and engineering teams to design and implement new data products powered by the data you help collect, and enhance and improve upon existing products.
• Learn and apply domain-specific knowledge in web crawling and data acquisition, with mentorship from experienced teammates and access to existing systems.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

Asynchronous programming

Data ingestion

Web crawling

Education

Degree in a quantitative field such as computer science, mathematics, or engineering

Tools

Python

Go

Rust

Kafka

SQS

Airflow

Linux

SQL

Apache Spark

Databricks

Job description

People Data Labs is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to help advance our data acquisition and processing platform. You will design and evolve backend services, build large-scale data pipelines, and apply web crawling techniques to expand our high-quality datasets.

You will work in a remote-first environment with a strong emphasis on ownership, collaboration, and learning. A background in data engineering, distributed systems, and API integration will help you contribute to impactful, scalable data