About the role
Restless is hiring an EU-based senior developer specialising in production web scraping to improve Antenna, our audience intelligence platform, and build the product features that surface its data.
Terms: freelance contract, 2 days per week during October–November 2026 (about 18 days), with scope to extend. Up to £550 per day depending on experience. Fully remote from an EU country. Reports to the CTO, with a weekly check-in and direct access to the founders.
About Restless
Restless is an AI marketing company founded in 2026. Our senior social and performance team uses Antenna to map brand audiences across the internet, combining contextual and conversational signals with creative performance data.
What you will do
• Audit existing collection sources and recommend custom scrapers, official APIs, managed providers or vendor datasets based on reliability, cost, upkeep and legal risk.
• Expand public-data collection across category conversations, competitor websites, social platforms, forums, reviews, app stores and ad libraries.
• Replace fragile collectors, add health checks, alerts and daily test scrapes, and catch silent data failures.
• Preserve raw data and build queue-based jobs with retries, rate limits and safe re-runs.
• Build API endpoints and web-app screens to configure sources, monitor runs and review data.
• Track spend per source and client, benchmark providers and reduce cost per useful record.
• Ship tested, validated and documented production code across the full stack.
Essential experience
• 5+ years building production scraping and data-collection systems, with concrete projects and dated work history.
• Strong full-stack TypeScript: Node.js/Express, React/Next.js and PostgreSQL.
• Playwright or similar browser automation; knowing when to use underlying JSON/API responses instead of a browser.
• Managed scraping APIs, unblockers, residential proxies and hosted browsers; practical knowledge of Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai and browser fingerprinting.
• Background queues, retries, rate limiting, idempotent jobs and data-quality monitoring, including schema validation such as Zod.
• Good judgement on UK GDPR, platform terms and logged-out public-data collection.
Useful extras: social-listening or martech experience; collecting X, Reddit or forum data at scale; provider cost/quality comparisons; Firecrawl, Crawl4AI, Browserbase and AI-assisted extraction.
This role is not suitable if your approach relies on fake accounts or logged-in scraping, lacks failure monitoring, or cannot estimate cost per 1,000 records.
How to apply
Email with your CV or LinkedIn, EU location, October availability and day rate. Include a short account of the hardest source you have collected at scale, your role and dates, and how you detected failures.
Process: introductory call, a paid 3–4-hour technical task, then a final conversation.
Originally posted on Himalayas