Solutions Architect at ZenRows

Remote / Spain

Solutions Architect - Spain / Remote (Based in Spain) 🇪🇸

ZenRows is a rapidly growing startup. We work 100% remotely and have been developing a SaaS for massive data collection that includes the most complete Anti-Bot protection bypass system on the market. This is currently used by thousands of companies worldwide in diverse sectors like marketing, real estate, e-commerce, and finance.

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Aurken and Ander, and after raising our first funding round last year (+€1.1M), ZenRows is made up of a small team of 10 people, and we are looking to expand our Software Engineering team.

Who Are We Looking For?

Professionals with vision: if you can start visualising how to assemble pieces in your head by just skimming through a project's "summary" on a roadmap, shaping the architecture of the final solution, then you are what we are looking for. At ZenRows, we have a very demanding roadmap, and we need to incorporate profiles that can land tasks, define the technology stack, and get to work building our next big thing.
Intellectuals with a critical mindset who aren't swayed by trends. If you believe there's a hammer for every nail, that Kubernetes is overkill for the vast majority of companies, that "Serverless" still involves servers, and that developing a monolith instead of a microservices architecture isn't "old-fashioned," then we speak the same language.
Hands-on profiles, not those based on PowerPoint. We develop software here, and architecture is just one part of it. We're looking for talent that not only leads the design of solutions but also helps the team develop them. If your architectural diagrams are spectacular, hopefully, you also know the difference between an ‘integer’ and a ‘float’.
Natural leaders, proactive and responsible: we're seeking profiles with the skills to not only design solutions but also to lead, guide, and accompany the rest of the engineering team in implementing them. We want people who rise to the occasion when things get tough; we don't hide here.
Lovers of innovation and technology: we need someone who is always up to date with the latest trends in software development and isn't afraid to discover and try out new technologies. At ZenRows, we face challenges that can't always be solved with a traditional tech stack: your job will be to identify the best stack for each project. Experimentation is in our DNA.
A non-stack profile: many of the solutions we'll develop together in the coming years will start from a blank canvas, meaning there are no stack restrictions, and as long as you can evaluate the pros and cons of each, that's enough. Of course, you'll score extra points if you have experience in some of the following technologies we already work with:

Go, as it is our main programming language, and most of the software we've built so far is developed in this language.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), since all our software runs 100% in the public cloud and the vast majority, specifically, on AWS. We use dozens of services like Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, Amazon ElastiCache, SNS, SQS, Lambda functions, etc.
Containers, as all our software runs inside containers during most of its lifecycle (development, testing, and production).
Event-driven Architectures, as even though most of our service is synchronous, we use (and will use) a lot of decoupled processes around the core, managed based on signals or events.

What Do We Offer?

Flexible working hours: we don't count the hours you're connected on Slack, nor do we care if you prefer to get up early or work late at night. We are responsible and organize our workdays as best suits us.
100% remote work: some team members are on different continents and time zones. If we see each other in person, it will likely only be to celebrate. 🎉
An incredible opportunity for professional growth: we have very high-level technological challenges, a generous budget, and a core team with much experience. There's no time to get bored, you set the limit. Professional growth ad infinitum.
Technical and language training: the team communicates in English. If you need classes to reinforce your level or want to do any technical course/training, just say it!
Whatever you need to do your job: do you prefer a MacBook over an HP laptop? Do you need a software license for your favourite IDE? GitHub Copilot? Just ask for it.
A flat organisation: the CEO is good-natured and is on Slack, just like the rest. If you need something, write to him. No bureaucracy, no nonsense. Your voice will be constantly heard.

What Can You Expect?

We have grown frantically in recent months, and sustaining the growth of such a dynamic startup with such a small engineering team means that your incorporation will probably not be conventional:

What you will find

Some of the most significant technological challenges in the national scene. Our backend is not a REST API that performs CRUD operations against a database. At ZenRows, we develop software with which we orchestrate thousands of CPU cores, hundreds of gigabytes of memory, manage millions of daily requests, and have outgoing network traffic of hundreds of terabytes per month, simulate human behavior to not be detected by antibot services developed by companies with thousands of engineers and billions of dollars in budget… and much more. What we develop is out of the ordinary.
A truly multidisciplinary team. No tricks. We are a small team, and that generally implies that in your day-to-day, you will end up touching (and learning!) a lot of different technologies in a lot of different projects: one day, you might be programming in Go, then a script in bash, touching infrastructure in AWS or GCP, lending a hand to the Growth team with the CMS, contributing to public documentation in Markdown, or exposing a REST endpoint for a Laravel to consume. We just need you not to be afraid. No one will blame you if you need to learn the syntax when switching technologies, introduce bugs, or it's the first time you've seen something similar.
Autonomy. Although the company's roadmap is always present, day-to-day tasks are not marked. Most of the time, you will decide what you will focus your efforts on, what you think adds more value, and get to work.
No-blame culture. Whoever touches stuff breaks stuff. We deploy to production many times daily, and sometimes we mess up. Rollback, we learn from mistakes and deploy again. We are adults, we don't throw anyone under the bus when things don't go well. We are a team and prefer to find a way to prevent a problem from repeating rather than wasting time looking for the culprit.

What you will not find

A ton of documentation on the projects. As the team grows, so does the documentation. For now, you won't find many updated architecture diagrams or a Notion with a thousand hours of reading. We expect you to be able to dive into the code little by little, understanding and asking everything you need.
A coverage of unit tests of 90%. Not even 80%. Not even 60%. We develop tests for the parts we know can explode at any moment, but we prefer to err on the side of leaving things untested rather than delaying the features that support the business. We are quite pragmatic and optimize our time / effort as much as possible.
Agile, Scrum, Lean... or whatever development methodology is trendy this week. You'll have a rather horizontal view of technology and will be able to identify where you think you can contribute the most. However, we don't work in sprints, nor is there a man in a tie to whom you need to justify each morning why something is taking longer than predicted to deploy. We have a roadmap, a backlog and a three-column Kanban board: that's it.
A comfortable job. We are an early-stage startup, day-to-day is not comfortable. We have fun, we love what we do, but we work hard and commit. If there is a fire, everyone pitches in. If you are looking to work in pyjamas from home from 9:00h to 15:00h… this is not the place. P.S.: You can work in pyjamas if you like :P