Staff Engineer (Core & MLOps) - Remote

Why Zyte?

At Zyte, we don’t just collect web data—we solve complex web data challenges at scale. We are a globally distributed team that is bold, curious, and dedicated to building innovative ways to deliver clean, reliable web data from across the internet.

• Data is our passion: We unlock access to open web data, empowering organizations—from startups to global enterprises—to power competitive intelligence, analytics, and AI pipelines.
• Remote-first culture: Work from anywhere in the world. With over 260 Zytans across 33 countries, our strength comes from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.
• Engineering excellence: We love diving deep into complex code bases, evaluating emerging technologies, and pushing technical boundaries.
• Real-world distributed systems challenges: Tackle rare engineering problems in custom networking, high-throughput streaming, and large-scale orchestration under real-world operational constraints.

Why This Role?

Zyte API powers a suite of Java and Python microservices running across multiple cloud providers and data centers. Every engineering team relies on foundational infrastructure managed by our team: Kubernetes clusters, high-throughput Kafka pipelines, billing engines, and robust inter-service contracts.

We are evolving Zyte API into an automated software factory: a platform where developers and AI agents seamlessly create, validate, deploy, and maintain data extractors and workflows through governed interfaces. As a Staff Engineer, you will own the control and context plane architectures, setting the engineering standard for how services at Zyte are designed, built, and operated. You will be the technical lead in the Core & MLOps squad.

What You’ll Do

• Architect the control and context planes: Advance the control plane into a robust production substrate and build the context plane to aggregate operational signals, creating automated feedback loops between intent, execution, and self-healing maintenance.
• Own the service chassis and golden path: Maintain and refine multi-language client libraries (Java and Python), standardized workload specifications, Helm charts, and deployment pipelines.
• Define inter-service contracts: Establish gRPC and Protocol Buffer definitions, API gateway transcoding, versioning policies, and schema evolution rules.
• Operate the platform substrate: Partner with infrastructure engineers to run Kubernetes, Terraform, HAProxy/Nginx ingresses, Confluent Kafka, real-time event-billing pipelines, Valkey, and ongoing database modernizations (MySQL to PostgreSQL).
• Drive architectural strategy via RFDs: Lead Requests for Discussion on critical platform initiatives, including durable workflow orchestration, per-request gateway orchestration, and multi-cluster routing.
• Institutionalize reliability engineering: Establish clear SLOs and error budgets for core capabilities, implementing health-aware traffic isolation and automated weighted canary deployments.
• Share production ownership: Participate in the shared infrastructure on-call rotation and lead incident post-mortems.
• Elevate engineering standards: Mentor engineers across squads on distributed systems design and establish intuitive best practices.

Who You Are

• 10+ years of experience building scalable distributed backend systems, with a proven track record of authoring internal platforms or core libraries.
• Expertise in Java (using reactive frameworks like Vert.x or Netty) alongside strong proficiency in Python.
• Deep gRPC & Protobuf experience, managing schema evolution and backward compatibility in mission-critical environments.
• Hands-on infrastructure expertise with production Kubernetes at scale, Terraform, and event streaming with Kafka.
• Feedback loop designer: Experience designing automated telemetry pipelines, materialized views, or feature stores that dynamically adapt system behavior based on production data.
• Reliability mindset: Proven success defining SLOs/SLIs, analyzing blast radius, and designing fault-tolerant systems.
• Technical leadership: Exceptional technical writing skills with the ability to drive technical alignment across multi-functional teams.
• Async communication: Strong interpersonal and written communication skills tailored for a distributed, remote-first environment.

Our Tech Stack

• Languages: Java 21, Python
• Frameworks & Tools: Vert.x, Netty, gRPC and protobuf, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, CircleCI
• Infrastructure: Multi-cloud (OCI, GCP) and data centres (Hetzner, Servers.com)
• Data & Messaging: Confluent Kafka, BigQuery, Valkey, MySQL (Postgres next), HBase, Google Pub/Sub
• Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry