Senior Data Acquisition Engineer

About the Position

As a Senior Data Acquisition Engineer, you will own and evolve the systems responsible for large-scale web data collection. You will design and maintain production-grade scraping and ingestion infrastructure that enables multiple teams to reliably add and operate data sources.

This role sits within the Data Engineering team and focuses on building scalable, observable, and resilient systems that handle production data. You will work closely with data engineers and product teams to level up data pipelines and ensure data acquisition scales with the business.

This role presents an exciting opportunity to shape the future of AI‑driven technologies and make meaningful contributions to real‑world applications.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Build a scalable web data acquisition platform used across teams. Enable not just your team but other teams to ingest data more safely and efficiently.
• Make tradeoffs between costs, reliability and performance in key architecture decisions
• Create shared abstractions and tooling that make it easy to add, maintain, and operate scrapers in production.
• Own system reliability, including smart retries, backoff strategies, error handling, and failure recovery. Continuously improve resilience, correctness and maintainability of scraping and data ingestion infrastructure.
• Build observability into data pipelines through logging, metrics, and alerting. Monitor data quality. Improve and scale end-to-end data pipelines.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to support new data sources and evolving product requirements.

Qualifications

• At least 5 years of experience building and operating production-grade backend, data, or platform systems, with hands-on experience in web data acquisition or scraping.
• Operated systems in environments with frequent change, partial failure, and external constraints.
• Product-oriented engineering mindset. Strong problem-solving skills and ownership mindset in production environments.
• Solid understanding of networking fundamentals: TLS/SSL behavior, timeouts, and failure modes.
• Hands-on experience with browser automation tools.
• Proficiency using CSS selectors and XPath for data extraction.
• Experience designing systems with robust retry logic, error handling, testing, and observability.
• Proficiency with SQL and NoSQL databases
• Experience designing and operating production systems on AWS, including VPC networking, service-to-service communication, monitoring, and on-call operations.

Nice to Have

• Experience building or maintaining browser extensions.
• Exposure to browser internals or browser source code (e.g. debugging, patching, or extending browser behavior
• Background in large-scale crawling, scraping, or distributed data systems.

About Bluefish:

Bluefish believes that AI represents the next major chapter of the internet – and that consumers will increasingly use AI to consume information and media online. On this new AI internet, brands will need new tools and technologies to tell their stories to consumers online – and a new marketing ecosystem will be created around AI. Bluefish is building the platform that helps brands engage consumers on this new AI channel, with powerful enterprise tools to manage AI brand safety and engage consumers with thoughtful and personalized AI marketing experiences. 

The Bluefish team is a tight-knit group of mar-tech industry veterans who previously helped build foundational ad-tech platforms now owned by Meta and Microsoft. Bluefish, the leading AI marketing platform for the Fortune 500, recently announced a $20M Series A funding round led by NEA, with participation from Salesforce Ventures. Additional investors include Crane Venture Partners, Swift Ventures, and Bloomberg Beta. We are a globally distributed team, with business operations based in New York City and engineering based in Berlin.  

Why Bluefish & Our Values:

• Unique opportunity to join on the ground floor of a fast-moving startup building at the center of AI 
• Tackle challenging and abstract problems while disrupting the $300BN legacy mar-tech industry 
• Join an experienced high-performing team where you will have immediate ownership and impact 
• Experience a true meritocracy with significant career growth upside as the business scales 

Our Values:

• Demonstrated grit and resourcefulness - you find creative solutions, adapt quickly, and aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves in a fast-paced, evolving environment.
• Thoughtful and strategic thinker with the ability to anticipate needs, ask the right questions, and deliver insights that truly drive value.
• Proven ability to collaborate across functions and roles, fostering open communication and shared ownership of outcomes.
• Commitment to craftsmanship - you take pride in delivering high-quality work, paying attention to the small details while keeping the big picture in mind.
• Self-starter with a proactive mindset and a strong sense of accountability - able to drive projects forward independently while staying aligned with team goals.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and learning new tools, processes, or technologies to get the job done.