At a Glance
- Tasks: Design and operate large-scale web data acquisition systems for cutting-edge AI research.
- Company: Join a lean, innovative team powering the future of web data and AI.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, flexible work environment, and opportunities for rapid career growth.
- Other info: Dynamic role with exposure to advanced technologies and collaborative research teams.
- Why this job: Make a real impact by building systems that drive AI model development.
- Qualifications: Strong programming skills in Go, Rust, Python, Java, or C++ required.
The predicted salary is between 59400 - 72600 £ per year.
Who We Are:
We build infrastructure that delivers massive amounts of web data to the companies training the world’s most powerful AI models. We're the team that helps to power and support Grass, a bandwidth-sharing network that lets us operate a massive distributed crawler, giving us unique access to high-quality public web data at global scale. On top of that, we’ve built pipelines for ingesting, segmenting, and annotating billions of videos, transcripts, and audio files, powering dataset creation for frontier labs. We’re lean, technical, and move fast. No red tape, no slow decision-making; just a team of builders pushing to expand what’s possible for open web data and AI.
Overview:
As a Research Crawling Engineer, you will design and operate large-scale web data acquisition systems for research and model development. Your work will span distributed systems, scraping infrastructure, and data pipelines.
Tasks Responsibilities:
- Build and maintain large-scale web crawlers across diverse domains
- Design high-throughput, fault-tolerant systems for data collection (millions to billions of URLs/day)
- Handle anti-bot systems, rate limits, and dynamic/JS-heavy sites
- Develop pipelines for cleaning, deduplication, filtering, and normalisation
- Construct and maintain datasets for research and model training
- Monitor crawl performance, coverage, and data quality; iterate quickly
- Collaborate with research teams to align data collection with modeling needs
- Optimize infrastructure for cost, latency, and reliability
Requirements:
- Strong programming experience in one or more of: Go, Rust, Python, Java, or C++
- Experience building web crawlers or large-scale data pipelines
- Solid understanding of HTTP, networking, and browser behavior
- Familiarity with distributed systems and parallel processing
- Experience working with large datasets (TB–PB scale preferred)
- Ability to debug unstable or adversarial environments
Preferred / Bonus:
- Experience with NLP pipelines or dataset curation for ML
- Familiarity with LLM pretraining data or retrieval systems
- Experience with headless browsers (e.g., Chrome DevTools Protocol, Playwright, Puppeteer)
- Knowledge of proxy systems, IP rotation, and large-scale request orchestration
- Background in data quality evaluation or benchmarking
- Experience running workloads on cloud or bare-metal infrastructure
What This Role Involves:
- Operating at the boundary of scale and reliability
- Adapting to constantly changing web environments
- Balancing throughput, coverage, and data quality
- Owning end-to-end data acquisition pipelines
Evaluation Criteria:
- Ability to design systems that scale without degrading quality
- Practical problem-solving under real-world constraints
Research Crawling Engineer in London employer: Ant-Tech
As a Research Crawling Engineer at our innovative company, you'll be part of a dynamic team that thrives on building cutting-edge infrastructure for web data acquisition. We foster a fast-paced, collaborative work culture that prioritises technical excellence and encourages continuous learning, offering ample opportunities for professional growth. Located in a vibrant tech hub, we provide a unique environment where your contributions directly impact the future of AI and open web data.
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We think you need these skills to ace Research Crawling Engineer in London
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