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. If you thrive on creative problem-solving and reliably delivering production-grade solutions, you will fit right in.

• Established system design framework: We systematically analyze functional and product requirements alongside architectural trade-offs to make informed, sustainable design decisions.

• Real-world distributed systems challenges: Tackle rare engineering problems in custom networking, high-throughput streaming, and large-scale orchestration under real-world operational constraints.

• Strong product ownership: Work on a profitable, market-leading platform with dedicated time and resources allocated for architectural research and strategic feature engineering.

Why This Role?Zyte API powers a suite of Java and Python microservices running across multiple cloud providers and data centers. Every engineering team—spanning Core API, Browser, Edge, Antiban, AI, and Agentic products—relies on foundational infrastructure managed by our team: Kubernetes clusters, high-throughput Kafka pipelines, billing engines processing per-request metrics, 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. Two foundational layers drive this evolution. The control plane (service/schema registries, health-aware routing, automated canary releases) is actively under deployment. The context plane, which synthesizes observational signals to guide automated repair and optimizations, represents our next major design effort. As a Staff Engineer, you will own both 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, collaborating closely with the Team Lead, Senior Engineers, DevOps, and QA, while directly influencing the release velocity and architecture of five neighboring squads.

RequirementsWhat You’ll Do

• Architect the control and context planes. Advance the control plane (service registry, schema registry, SLO enforcement, CLI tooling) into a robust production substrate. Design and build the context plane to aggregate operational signals—such as domain extraction histories, IP reputation scores, and BigQuery cost/performance telemetry—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, driving seamless adoption across all product teams.

• Define inter-service contracts. Establish gRPC and Protocol Buffer definitions, API gateway transcoding, versioning policies, and schema evolution rules to enable autonomous, safe deployments across teams.

• Operate the platform substrate. Partner with infrastructure engineers to run Kubernetes (across OCI, Hetzner, Servers.com, and GC...