Company Description Cars XE is an industry leader in providing advanced API solutions that deliver comprehensive automotive data for integration into various platforms and applications. Catering to automotive dealers, insurance companies, developers, and consumers, we offer detailed vehicle history, specifications, market valuations, and high-quality images. Trusted by leading organizations, our mission is to enable accurate, reliable, and innovative data solutions that shape the future of the automotive industry. Join Cars XE in driving the next wave of automotive data innovation.
Role Description You'll build the data backbone of Cars XE. Every new signal we sell — VIN decoders, plate readers, recalls, OEM feeds, Chinese VIN structures, ownership records — flows through pipelines you design. You own ingestion end-to-end: scraping, ETL, warehouse modeling, and the orchestration that keeps customer data fresh.
This is a hands-on, high-leverage role on a small team. You'll set the platform direction and ship code in your first week. You'll work directly with the founder and Head of Engineering.
What you'll do Design and operate our data platform on GCP — Big Query, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Cloud Scheduler / Workflows. Build production scrapers and source connectors in Node JS or Python. Crack hostile websites. Many of the sources we need are actively trying to keep us out. You'll handle Cloudflare / Data Dome / Perimeter X / Akamai bot protection, TLS fingerprinting (JA3 / JA4), residential proxy rotation, browser fingerprint evasion, and the occasional reverse-engineered mobile API. Implement deduplication, schema reconciliation, and data quality checks at ingest. Partner with our API engineers to expose new datasets to customers — your pipelines directly power what they pay for. Own data freshness SLOs and the cost-vs-performance tradeoff of our data infrastructure.
You'll thrive here if you have 5+ years of data engineering experience. Production experience on GCP — Big Query, Cloud Run / Functions, Pub/Sub, Dataflow or Cloud Composer. Strong Node JS or Python (we use both; comfort in either is fine, fluency in one is required). Battle-tested scraping skills. You've shipped with Playwright or Puppeteer (stealth plugins), worked around TLS fingerprinting using curl_cffi or undetected-chromedriver, rotated residential / ISP proxies, and you know when to switch from headless browser to direct HTTP and back. Warehouse modeling with dbt or equivalent. A track record of shipping pipelines that customers ultimately depend on — not internalonly tooling. Bonus points Firebase / Firestore in production. Automotive or VIN data domain experience (NHTSA, WMI structure, OEM data sources). Experience with a low-latency analytics store (Click House, Big Query BI Engine). You've reverse-engineered a mobile app's API to access data not exposed on the web. You've written publicly about scraping, anti-bot evasion, or data engineering.
What we offer Competitive salary plus meaningful equity. Fully remote, async-friendly. Strong overlap with US Eastern preferred but not required. High-leverage role on a small team that ships fast. Your work will be in production within a week. Stack: GCP (Big Query, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub), Firebase, Node JS / Type Script, Python where it makes sense. Direct line to the founder and engineering leadership. No layers.