Web Scraping Engineer

Alphamatician; Indiana (PA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Alphamatician is seeking a Web Scraping Engineer to join as an individual contributor at the heart of our data operations. You will maintain and improve our mature alternative-data product used by institutional investors, focusing on reliability and scale.

Daily work includes reviewing overnight pipeline logs, fixing PHP issues and updating scrapers as sites change, verifying data quality, answering client inquiries, and contributing to new datasets and features.

Qualifications

• Production PHP experience with public work (repo/blog/post) required.
• Proficiency in Python scraping libraries and modern tools.
• Experience scraping hard targets at scale with anti-bot defenses.
• MySQL querying on large data sets; performance tuning.

Responsibilities

• Review overnight pipeline logs and triage issues.
• Fix PHP bugs and update scrapers as sites change structure/defenses.
• Ensure data quality and validate with historical baselines.
• Respond to client inquiries about coverage, methodology, or anomalies.
• Contribute to collection strategies and new datasets/features.

Skills

Production PHP

Public PHP work

Python scraping

Playwright

Scrapy

Selenium

Requests

httpx

BeautifulSoup

MySQL

US employment history

Tools

CodeIgniter 4

Playwright

Scrapy

Selenium

Requests

httpx

BeautifulSoup

Job description

Alphamatician is hiring a Web Scraping Engineer for an individual-contributor role at the heart of our data operations. The work is technical, operational, and quietly important: keeping a mature alternative-data product running reliably for institutional investors.

What You Will Do

• Morning (7am ET). Review overnight pipeline logs. Identify failures, anomalies, or coverage gaps. Triage fixes and follow-ups.
• Engineering work. Fix PHP bugs. Update scrapers as target sites change their structure or defenses. Update cron logic. Ship incremental improvements to collection coverage and quality.
• Data quality. Run checks against current and historical baselines to confirm coverage and accuracy.
• Client questions. Respond to client inquiries about coverage, methodology, or anomalies as they come in.
• Strategy. Periodically discuss collection strategies, help scope and stand up new datasets, and contribute to new products and features.

This is operational work with a steady rhythm. The reward is in keeping an important data product running well, and in being good at a specific kind of hard problem (scraping hard sites at scale) that few people are actually good at.

Hard Requirements

• Production PHP experience. CodeIgniter 4 is a strong plus. You must be able to point to public PHP work: a repo, contributions to a project, a blog post, or similar.
• Python proficiency with modern scraping libraries. Working fluency in Playwright, Scrapy, Selenium, Requests, httpx, BeautifulSoup, or comparable.
• Demonstrated experience scraping hard targets at scale. Sites with active anti-bot defenses, dynamic rendering, rate-limit walls, or aggressive blocking. You must include a link to public scraping work in your application, or describe a specific scraper you built in detail (target, defenses encountered, how you solved them).
• MySQL competence. Reading, writing, and optimizing non-trivial queries against tables with hundreds of millions of rows.
• Schedule. 7am US Eastern start.
• US-based with verifiable employment history.

Strong Plusses

• Direct experience with anti-bot evasion: residential proxies, TLS fingerprint matching, JA3, header rotation, CAPTCHA strategy.
• Comfort with mature, incrementally maintained codebases rather than green-field environments.
• Background in financial data, alternative data, or equity research.
• Node.js, Puppeteer, or additional automation tooling.

Scope

This role focuses on day-to-day data collection, quality, and client-facing operations. It is not an architecture, modernization, or infrastructure-ownership role. If you want to redesign systems or own the stack, this is not the right fit. If you want to do excellent scraping work, solve real bugs, and own the daily craft of keeping a data product reliable, please apply.