Team Lead for Actors (Node.js/TypeScript)

Apify is the largest marketplace of tools for AI. 40,000+ Actors helping people and agents get real-time web data, track competitors, generate leads, or integrate their apps. Actors are built by a global creator community that now earns more than $1.2 million every month.

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