Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Nascent is seeking a Software Engineer, Data Acquisition to support its trading and research operations. The role combines software engineering and operations to build and maintain Rust-based web scraping systems, resilient data pipelines, distributed infrastructure, proxy systems, observability, and agentic workflows for reliable large-scale data acquisition.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain production-grade web scraping systems — primarily in Rust — designing scrapers that are resilient to site changes, rate limiting, CAPTCHAs, and evolving anti-bot countermeasures
- Operate and monitor a heterogeneous distributed infrastructure spanning multiple cloud providers, bare metal, and mixed operating systems — you own uptime, not just deployments
- Diagnose production issues from raw logs and telemetry, building observability into every system you ship so problems surface before they cascade
- Design and implement proxy management, rotation strategies, and network-layer evasion techniques to maintain reliable data acquisition at scale
- Develop tooling for fleet health monitoring, automated alerting, and self-healing infrastructure across a diverse set of machines and hosting environments
- Collaborate with analysts and researchers to understand data requirements, prioritize new source integrations, and ensure data quality and freshness meet trading-grade standards
- Reverse-engineer web applications and APIs — inspecting network traffic, deobfuscating JavaScript, and adapting to adversarial changes in target sites
- Continuously improve system reliability, throughput, and maintainability — refactoring scraping pipelines, optimizing connection handling, and reducing operational toil through automation
- Deploy and maintain agentic workflows for data source discovery, onboarding, and troubleshooting — using LLM-based agents to automate the identification of new sources, accelerate integration, and surface and resolve failures in existing pipelines
Skills
- • 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, but if you haven't written it professionally, you're the kind of engineer who picks up new languages fast and takes ownership of the ramp
- • Python is useful for scripting, prototyping, and analyst-facing tooling
- • 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 don't treat AI as a novelty; you reach for it when it's the right tool and build on top of it
- • You have strong networking intuition — you think in terms of TCP connections, DNS resolution, HTTP headers, and proxy chains, not just API calls
- • 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 — this is core to how we discover and onboard new data sources
- • 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
- • Experience with Rust — the stack is primarily Rust, and prior production experience accelerates your ramp significantly
- • Proficiency in Python — useful for scripting, prototyping, and interacting with analyst-facing tooling
- • Experience with cloud providers (AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean) and managing infrastructure across multiple providers simultaneously
- • Background in high-throughput HTTP at scale — proxy management, VPN/routing optimization, and connection pooling
- • Exposure to real-time or latency-sensitive systems (HFT-adjacent experience is a plus)
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.
Company Overview