Senior Backend/Infra Engineer for High-Scale Headless Browser Automation and Experimentation Framework

I’m building a high-scale headless browser automation and experimentation framework that will:

• Run thousands of browser sessions in parallel for testing, data collection, and content experiments.
• Start life on a single VPS, and later move onto a dedicated on prem server
• Integrate with an existing Java/Appium codebase, but the new core will be containerized, observable, and easy to scale.

This is not a traditional CRUD app. It’s closer to building the backbone for a mini cloud: containers, queues, orchestration, metrics, and clean deployment.

I’m looking for a hands-on backend/infra engineer who is comfortable owning the base platform end-to-end.

Must-Have Skills

• Strong experience on Linux servers (Ubuntu).
• Deep hands-on with:
• Docker or Podman in production (multi-service setups).
• PostgreSQL (schema design, basic performance tuning).
• Redis (queues + caching).
• Experience setting up:
• Prometheus + Grafana (or equivalent) for metrics.
• Centralized logging for containerized apps.
• Comfortable designing service boundaries and deployment layouts from scratch.
• Can communicate clearly in English and explain trade-offs (e.g. Docker vs Podman, nginx vs Traefik, etc.).

Nice-to-Have

• Experience with distributed systems or high-throughput job queues.
• Familiarity with Playwright / Puppeteer / Selenium (for later milestones).
• Experience with Kubernetes (we may evolve there later).
• Previous work on load-testing / automation / scraping platforms.

• Fully remote, async-friendly.
• We’ll start with Milestone 1 only; if it goes well, there are follow-up milestones (orchestration engine, browser workers, campaign logic, etc.).
• I’ll provide design doc and be available as the “product/CTO” side, so you’re not guessing requirements.

1. A brief description of similar platforms you’ve built:

• e.g. “job queue + workers + metrics + dashboards on Docker/Kubernetes”.

2. A link to any repo or screenshot of:

• A docker-compose / infra repo you’ve set up.
• Or a Grafana dashboard you’ve created.