Software Engineer, Data Acquisition

As a Software Engineer focused on Data Acquisition at Nascent, you'll own the systems that feed the trading and research operations with the data they need to compete. You'll build and operate web scraping and data acquisition infrastructure running 24/7 across a heterogeneous fleet of machines, providers, and operating systems. This role splits roughly 50/50 between writing production code (primarily Rust) to build scrapers, defeat anti-bot countermeasures, and architect resilient pipelines, and deep operational work: diagnosing failures, tuning proxies, and keeping a distributed system healthy across mixed infrastructure. You'll work closely with analysts and researchers who depend on the data you deliver, solving genuinely interesting problems where every major website is actively trying to stop you and the surface area of what breaks is enormous. This is an onsite role in the Montreal office.

What you'll do

• Build and maintain production-grade web scraping systems, primarily in Rust, designing scrapers that are resilient to site changes, rate limiting, CAPTCHAs, and evolving anti-bot countermeasures.
• Operate and monitor a heterogeneous distributed infrastructure spanning multiple cloud providers, bare metal, and mixed operating systems, owning uptime and not just deployments.
• Diagnose production issues from raw logs and telemetry, building observability into every system you ship so problems surface before they cascade.
• Design and implement proxy management, rotation strategies, and network-layer evasion techniques to maintain reliable data acquisition at scale.
• Develop tooling for fleet health monitoring, automated alerting, and self-healing infrastructure across a diverse set of machines and hosting environments.
• Collaborate with analysts and researchers to understand data requirements, prioritize new source integrations, and ensure data quality and freshness meet trading-grade standards.
• Reverse-engineer web applications and APIs by inspecting network traffic, deobfuscating JavaScript, and adapting to adversarial changes in target sites.
• Continuously improve system reliability, throughput, and maintainability through refactoring scraping pipelines, optimizing connection handling, and reducing operational toil through automation.
• Deploy and maintain agentic workflows for data source discovery, onboarding, and troubleshooting, using LLM-based agents to automate the identification of new sources, accelerate integration, and surface and resolve failures in existing pipelines.

What you bring

• You are a builder who runs what you build: you don't consider a project done when the PR merges, but when it's been stable in production for weeks.
• You have a genuine interest in the cat-and-mouse game of web scraping at scale: anti-bot systems, browser fingerprinting, proxy rotation, and the constant adaptation it requires.
• You are comfortable navigating messy, heterogeneous infrastructure with mixed OS environments, multiple hosting providers, and hardware you didn't provision, and you make it better over time.
• You are energized by operational puzzles: tracing failures across distributed logs, identifying subtle network degradation, or figuring out why a scraper that worked yesterday is now blocked.
• You write clean, production-grade code and care about systems that run unattended and fail gracefully. You are proficient in at least one major programming language (Go, Python, C++, Java, or similar).
• You thrive in less-structured environments where you're trusted to prioritize your own work, and you take ownership of outcomes rather than waiting for tickets.
• You are fluent with agentic workflows and LLM-based tooling: you know how to design and operate AI agents to discover new data sources, automate onboarding, and triage failures in production pipelines, and you reach for AI when it's the right tool rather than treating it as a novelty.
• You have strong networking intuition and think in terms of TCP connections, DNS resolution, HTTP headers, and proxy chains, not just API calls.

Nice to have

• 2-5 years of professional software engineering experience with strong systems or backend fundamentals, producing production-grade code that runs in anger.
• Deep understanding of networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP internals, CDNs, proxies, load balancing, and queue handling.
• Hands-on experience with web scraping or data acquisition at scale, including familiarity with anti-bot/anti-automation countermeasures and evasion techniques.
• Demonstrated experience operating heterogeneous distributed infrastructure across mixed OS, hardware, and hosting providers, not just deploying to a single cloud provider.
• Strong log analysis and monitoring skills: you can diagnose issues from raw logs and build observability into systems you own.
• Hands-on experience building or operating agentic workflows (LLM-based agents, tool-use pipelines) for automation, data extraction, or system orchestration.
• Production experience with Rust, which accelerates your ramp significantly since the stack is primarily Rust.
• Proficiency in Python for scripting, prototyping, and interacting with analyst-facing tooling.
• Experience with cloud providers (AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean) and managing infrastructure across multiple providers simultaneously.
• Background in high-throughput HTTP at scale: proxy management, VPN/routing optimization, and connection pooling.
• Exposure to real-time or latency-sensitive systems, with HFT-adjacent experience as a plus.

What we offer

• The opportunity to learn, experiment, and build in an entrepreneurial environment.
• Remote-first, distributed team with frequent in-person sprints and retreats.
• Competitive total compensation with strong bonus upside tied to performance.
• Hardware and home-office stipend, conference and learning budgets.
• Comprehensive health benefits including medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus life insurance.
• Open vacation policy with flexible work hours and location.
• 16 weeks fully-paid parental leave plus supported return to work.
• Retirement matching.

About Nascent

Founded in 2020, Nascent builds, expands, and captures opportunity in open markets and permissionless technologies. Built on a base of permanent capital, Nascent deploys assets across liquid and long-term strategies, backing 100+ early-stage teams while combining venture and market pedigree with product-grade engineering to turn research into revenue. The team is an interdisciplinary group of engineers, quants, and operators focused on models, low-latency infrastructure, and resilient systems that compound performance over time.