Team Lead, Actors

Apify is a marketplace of ready-to-run tools for AI that automate work on the web. Thousands of Actors get web data, generate leads, monitor social media, track competitors, and integrate with existing apps and agents. Actors are created by a global community of builders who earn from them, while Apify manages infrastructure, billing, and distribution. Learn more at apify.com.

Join us to help people put the web to work. Apify can find missing children, protect consumers from fake discounts across the EU, and feed data to AI chatbots.

To support this mission, we're looking for a Team Lead to join the Universe team. You'll build and scale the Actors that power AI use cases across Apify - including tools like Website Content Crawler, which turns any website into clean data for AI models, vector databases, and RAG pipelines. If you care deeply about code quality, enjoy reverse-engineering how the web works, and want to shape the technical direction of a small, ambitious team - this is for you.

What you'll be working on

• Building and scaling Website Content Crawler and other core Actors that crawl any website reliably under real-world load. That means deep-crawling pages, stripping out the noise, and turning them into clean text, Markdown, and structured data that feed AI models, vector databases, and RAG pipelines, with a stack of AI tools doing the heavy lifting under the hood

• Working in a small, cross-functional team alongside other experienced hackers, a team you'll gradually take the lead of

• Contributing to Crawlee, Apify's open-source web scraping library, and stepping into product engineering when a project needs platform-level work. It won't be your day-to-day, but you'll jump in on these cross-team projects whenever they need a hand rather than handing the problem off

• Writing clean, elegant code that reads like a novel, and keeping it that way through reviews and refactoring

• Reverse-engineering how websites work behind the scenes, and designing APIs other developers love to use

• Using AI as a real part of the job, and building it too. AI is changing how web automation gets built, so you'll both put it to work day to day (writing code faster, prototyping, solving extraction problems that were impractical before) and help build the AI-powered tools that make the rest of the team and the wider community faster. You'll get a Claude Code license to do it

• Leading the Universe team. This is still a hands-on position where coding is an inseparable part of the job: you'll shape the technical direction, guide the team toward the right technical solutions, plan the technical work, unblock others, and keep building alongside the team

• May 2025 → today: +18 people on the team, and still growing

Who we're looking for

Must-haves

• You have experience leading a team or larger projects, formally or informally, and you want to grow in that direction. You like helping the people around you get things done, and you're OK making decisions and owning the outcomes

• You're strong in JavaScript and TypeScript (Node.js) and understand web technologies well

• You have at least 2 years of professional or open-source experience on a non-trivial project built with a team

• You treat code quality, readability, and frequent refactoring as part of getting the job done, not an afterthought

• You already use AI tools in your work and understand why they matter. You know where they help, where they don't, and you treat getting good at them as part of staying a strong engineer

• You have a problem-solving mindset and an appetite to keep learning, in web scraping, in leadership, and beyond

• You think in systems. You can design architecture, weigh trade-offs, and see how separate projects fit together into a coherent technical product

• You communicate clearly in English, in writing and in speech

Nice to have

• Experience with the people side of leading: hiring, mentoring, running 1on1s, or giving feedback

• A track record of contributing to a non-trivial, user-facing product

• Writing and sharing what you learn through tutorials, technical support, or tooling

• Open-source contributions

Our tech stack - Web Automation

• Development: Node.js (with TypeScript), Chrome Dev Tools, Crawlee, Apify SDK, Puppeteer, Playwright, jQuery /Cheerio + many other specialized libraries. We also released Python SDK and are acquiring expertise in Python scraping tools.

• Environment: Local IDE for development & testing. Then deploy to the Apify platform via GitHub for production.

• Tools: GitHub, ZenHub, Notion, Google Workspace, and GitHub Copilot license

  • Process: In-depth onboarding, code reviews, tests, automating whatever we can, using common sense over strict processes.

Role-specific tools: Claude Code license for AI-assisted development.

What we expect from you in the first 6 months:

By the end of the first 3 months, we expect you to:

• Understand the Universe team's codebase, architecture, and how its Actors connect to the broader Apify platform

• Ship at least one meaningful improvement to a core Actor (e.g., Website Content Crawler)

• Be doing code reviews independently and raising the bar in your PRs

• Have a working mental model of how browser automation, anti-bot systems, and data extraction fit together at scale

• Be taking on the first pieces of leadership: leading a smaller initiative and joining planning and prioritization

• Know the team well: how each person works, what they're strong at, and what they need from a lead

• Have a clear sense of where the biggest technical challenges and opportunities are for the team

By the end of the first 6 months, we expect you to:

• Have fully taken over the Universe team: planning, priorities, unblocking people, and representing the team across Apify are on you, while you stay hands-on in the code

• Have owned at least one major initiative end to end, from architecture decisions through shipping and iterating

• Be the go-to person for design decisions on the team's core tools

• Own the technical roadmap, shaping it with the team rather than executing someone else's

• Have contributed to Crawlee or another Apify open-source project in a meaningful way

• Have built or improved AI-powered tooling that makes the team or the wider community measurably faster

Why should you work at Apify?

• Space, support, and autonomy for personal growth, with a direct impact on our success

• Full-time position in Prague at our amazing office located in 100Yards

• Option to work remotely

• Flexible working hours

• Nobody counts holidays as long as the work gets done

• Unlimited Claude for every Apifier. We don't count tokens. Just use them well

• Stock options and profit sharing

• Free Apify credits for your friends and family to try the platform

• Free Multisport card

• Regular massages in the office, mostly covered by Apify

• We welcome pets, kids, and bikes at the office

• Epic team buildings and offsites with biking, canoeing, and other adventures

• Solid education and training budget, conference tickets, internal “Eat & Learn” sessions, and the possibility to work across teams

• Generous hardware budget

• Free lunches every day when working from the office

• Unlimited supply of & and snacks

• Free entry to the wonderful Prague Zoo

• Ping-pong, chess, PS5, foosball league after lunch

For more details about Apify and what it's like to work with us, see our Careers page.