Backend Engineer – Data Acquisition

Description

The company is an AI platform for hospitality that turns data from one of the largest hotel data networks into real-time intelligence hotels can act on.

It has raised $370M in Series C funding, passed $100M in ARR, and employs over 850 people across 35 countries.

Tens of thousands of hotels in 185 countries use its platform, including all of the top 15 global hotel chains and thousands of independent hotels.

This role is with the Crawler Engineering team, which keeps customers supplied with fresh, high-quality rates, ranking and supply data.

The job is full-time and hybrid, based in Ghent, Belgium, within the Engineering department.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop high-performance backend systems for data acquisition, mainly in Rust, that collect billions of data points from the web.
• Work on the in-house proxy layer and browser tooling, covering request routing, connection handling and protocol-level behaviour.
• Improve backend systems that handle close to 200 million requests a day.
• Investigate difficult crawler problems. When a data source blocks an approach, test alternatives and turn the ones that work into robust, reusable systems.
• Build clear interfaces and guardrails so other teams and AI agents can rely on what you build. Help make the infrastructure agent-friendly.
• Take ownership of code quality, including code written with AI assistance: tests, observability and maintainability.
• Work with crawler engineers, DevOps and Security to ship secure, scalable solutions.
• Stay on top of a changing web, keeping crawling infrastructure reliable and efficient across more than 200 data sources.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience building, deploying and running production backend services in a cloud environment.
• Experience with a systems language such as Rust, C or C++. Alternatively, a strong record in another backend language and a clear drive to go deep in Rust.
• A solid understanding of how the web works, including HTTP, TCP/IP, TLS and proxies.
• An R&D mindset: curiosity about how browsers and network stacks work internally, comfort with ambiguity, and a preference for testing a hypothesis over assuming it.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills, with comfort using packet captures, profilers and other people's source code.
• Clear communication, willingness to share opinions and receive feedback, and good teamwork.
• Fluent English.
• Technologies used: Rust, TypeScript/Node.js, Python, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana and Claude Code.

Conditions

Full-time position.

Hybrid setup, based in Ghent, Belgium.

Benefits

• Flexible working: work from home or from one of the company's global offices.
• Flexible time off to balance work and life.
• A friendly, high-standards team of colleagues.
• Career development through workshops, frameworks, tools, training and processes.
• Work that shapes products used by more than 85,000 users worldwide.
• A mobility budget or company car, depending on job category.
• Pay that is reviewed proactively to reflect your work.
• A net allowance for home office expenses.
• Lunch and eco vouchers.
• Comprehensive health insurance covering you and your dependents.
• Pension funding through group insurance.
• Referral bonuses for bringing in new talent.