Senior Backend / Infrastructure Engineer (Headless Automation Platform – VPS First)
About the Project 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. Who I’m Looking For 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. How We’ll Work • 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. When You Apply, Please Include 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. Apply tot his job