[Hiring] Software Engineer, Data Acquisition @Nascent

Role Description

You'll own the systems that feed Nascent's trading and research operations with the data they need to compete — building and operating the web scraping and data acquisition infrastructure that runs 24/7 across a heterogeneous fleet of machines, providers, and operating systems. This is a roughly 50/50 split between software engineering and operations:

• Half your time you're writing production code (primarily Rust) to build new scrapers, defeat anti-bot countermeasures, and architect resilient pipelines.
• The other half you're deep in logs, monitoring dashboards, and fleet health — diagnosing failures, tuning proxies, and keeping a distributed system humming across mixed infrastructure.

You'll work closely with analysts and researchers who depend on the data you deliver. The problems are genuinely interesting:

• Every major website is actively trying to stop you.
• Infrastructure spans multiple cloud providers and bare metal.
• The surface area of what breaks is enormous.

This role is remote-first. Montreal proximity is preferred — the team has a growing analyst presence there and in-person collaboration matters — but it's not a hard requirement. North American or European time zones work best for team overlap.

Qualifications

• You are a builder who also runs what you build — you don't consider a project done when the PR merges; you consider it done when it's been stable in production for weeks.
• You have a genuine interest in the cat-and-mouse game of web scraping at scale: anti-bot systems, browser fingerprinting, proxy rotation, and the constant adaptation it requires.
• You are comfortable navigating messy, heterogeneous infrastructure — mixed OS environments, multiple hosting providers, hardware you didn't provision — and you make it better over time.
• You are energized by operational puzzles: tracing a failure across distributed logs, identifying a subtle network degradation, or figuring out why a scraper that worked yesterday is now blocked.
• You write clean, production-grade code and care about systems that run unattended and fail gracefully.
• You are proficient in at least one major programming language (Go, Python, C++, Java, or similar) — the stack is primarily Rust, and prior Rust experience is a strong plus.
• You thrive in less-structured environments where you're trusted to prioritize your own work, and you take ownership of outcomes rather than waiting for tickets.
• You are fluent with agentic workflows and LLM-based tooling — you know how to design and operate AI agents to discover new data sources, automate onboarding, and triage failures in production pipelines.
• You have strong networking intuition — you think in terms of TCP connections, DNS resolution, HTTP headers, and proxy chains, not just API calls.

Requirements

• 2–5 years of professional software engineering experience with strong systems or backend fundamentals — production-grade code that runs in anger, not just toy projects or prototypes.
• Proficiency in at least one major programming language (Go, Python, C++, Java, or similar) is required; Rust experience is a strong plus but not a prerequisite.
• Deep understanding of networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP internals, CDNs, proxies, load balancing, and queue handling.
• Hands-on experience with web scraping or data acquisition at scale, including familiarity with anti-bot/anti-automation countermeasures and evasion techniques.
• Demonstrated experience operating heterogeneous distributed infrastructure (mixed OS, hardware, hosting providers) — not just deploying to a single cloud provider.
• Strong log analysis and monitoring skills: you can diagnose issues from raw logs and build observability into systems you own.
• Hands-on experience building or operating agentic workflows (LLM-based agents, tool-use pipelines) for automation, data extraction, or system orchestration.

Benefits

• The opportunity to learn, experiment and build in an entrepreneurial environment.
• Remote-first, distributed team with frequent in-person sprints and retreats.
• Competitive total comp with strong bonus upside tied to performance.
• Hardware & home-office stipend, conference and learning budgets.
• Comprehensive health benefits (medical/dental/vision), life insurance.
• Open vacation policy as well as flexible work hours and location.
• 16 weeks fully-paid parental leave + supported return to work.
• Retirement matching, open vacation policy, flexible hours.