Data Scraping / Web Developer

Restless is hiring a part-time contract web developer who specialises in data scraping. You'll expand and harden the data collection behind Antenna, our audience intelligence platform, and build the product features that surface it.
Commitment: 2 days per week, October to November 2026 (about 18 days), with scope to extend. Up to £550 per day. Fully remote, or at our London Bridge studio if you prefer.
About Restless
Restless is an AI marketing company, founded in 2026 with AI at its core. We are a senior team of social and performance experts, backed by our own software. That software is Antenna: it maps a brand's audience across the internet, reading contextual and conversational signals alongside creative performance data, and builds evidence-backed profiles of current and future customers.
The role
You will improve how Antenna collects data, and extend it beyond brand-owned sources into alternative data: the wider conversation around a category, its competitors and its customers. We want someone who knows how the best teams collect data in 2026 and will tell us what to build, what to buy, and what to stop doing.
What you'll do
Audit our collection and recommend the right approach per source: own scraper, managed unblocker, vendor dataset or official API
Add alternative data sources for market and category sentiment, e.g. X, wider Reddit, forums, and other social and review platforms
Fix collectors that are fragile or blocked
Make failures visible with health checks, drop alerts and daily test scrapes
Make runs safe to repeat: keep raw copies, sensible retries and rate limits
Build the API endpoints and web app screens to manage sources and monitor runs
Track cost per source and per client, and benchmark providers
What we're looking for
5+ years building production scraping and data collection systems
Strong full-stack TypeScript: Node.js and Express APIs, React and Next.js
Playwright or similar browser automation
Hands-on experience with managed scraping providers: scraper APIs, unblockers, residential proxies, hosted browsers
Working knowledge of modern anti-bot systems and when to buy rather than build
Queue-based background jobs, data validation (Zod or similar) and quality monitoring
PostgreSQL
A sound grasp of UK GDPR and platform terms for public-data collection
Nice to have: collecting X/Twitter, Reddit or forum data at scale; AI-assisted extraction tools; agency or martech background.
Process: intro call, a short paid technical task (3-4 hours), then a final conversation. To apply, send a short note on the most difficult data source you have collected at scale, and how you knew when it broke.

Work arrangement
Yes