Crawler & Automation Developer

Crawler & Automation Developer — Data Acquisition Team

About ChannelSight 

ChannelSight powers Where to Buy and Digital Shelf intelligence for some of the world's most recognisable brands, across 41 markets. We are the platform powering Agentic Commerce. We capture and convert demand with our AI-powered path-to-purchase platform. 

The work environment is flexible, highly technical, and rewarding. We pride ourselves on the quality of our people and the products we ship. 

We're headquartered in Dublin, growing fast, with a who's who of household-name clients already using our products. 

About the team 

The Data Acquisition (DAX) team is the engine room behind ChannelSight's data. We build and operate the scraping technology that extracts product information from thousands of retailer sites worldwide and we own the tooling and processes that make that work scalable. 

We're a small, capable team and we're investing heavily in AI-assisted automation. We're constantly looking for ways to push it further — inside DAX and across the wider business — to lift both cadence and quality at the same time. The AI tooling we've already built to accelerate bot design and repair is an initial step along that path. 

What you'll do 

Build, ship and own web crawlers using the Apify SDK (Cheerio, Puppeteer, Playwright) that extract product data from complex retailer sites at scale. 

Take crawlers from local prototype through to production, then keep them healthy — diagnosing issues, hardening against site changes, and making fixes that stick at the bot level rather than patching data downstream. 

Contribute to internal automation tooling. A meaningful slice of this role lives outside crawler code — helping us extend, improve and adopt the tools that make the team faster. We treat web scraping and general automation as equally important. 

Use AI tooling (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, ChatGPT — whatever fits the task) as a daily multiplier, not a novelty. Lean on it hard for the boring parts and bring real judgement to the rest. 

Write clear, well-scoped reports on issues and progress. Share knowledge openly. Help the team run faster. 

What we're looking for 

We're deliberately pitching this role broadly. If you read the below and think "that's me, but at a different level than you're advertising" — apply anyway. We'd rather hire the right person at the right level than miss them entirely. 

The non-negotiable is the combination of solid web fundamentals and the ability to get real leverage out of AI. One without the other doesn't work in this role: AI is only a multiplier if you understand what it's trying to do well enough to spot when it's wrong. 

Required 

• A working mental model of the web platform. You understand the client/server split, HTTP, what the browser is doing, and roughly how a request becomes a rendered page. You don't need every header memorised, but you need to be able to reason about the stack end-to-end. This is the thing that lets you direct an AI rather than be misled by it. 

• JavaScript & Node.js. Real, hands-on experience writing and shipping Node code. Comfortable with async, modules, npm, and the kinds of mistakes that only bite you in production. 

• HTML, CSS, and CSS/XPath selectors. You can pull a page apart in Chrome DevTools and target exactly what you need. 

• Regex. Fluent enough to use it where it fits and sensible enough to avoid it where it doesn't. 

• SQL. Comfortable querying relational databases for investigation and verification. 

• AI-fluent. You use modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or similar) every day. You know how to get good results out of them, you can spot when a model is bluffing, and you don't ship code you don't understand. 

• Excellent written and spoken English. 

• A "figure it out" instinct. The most interesting work on this team is usually at the edge of what someone has done before. We want someone comfortable being a beginner on a new problem, learning fast, and getting it over the line. 

Nice to have 

• Hands-on experience with Apify, Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium, Scrapy or similar. 

• Python for scripting, data wrangling, or internal tooling. 

• Experience with MS SQL Server / SQL Azure. 

• Background in ecommerce, retail data, or large-scale web data management. 

• Other languages (C#, Java, Go, etc.) — useful, never required. 

• Experience building internal developer tooling — CLIs, dashboards, dev-time scripts, IDE plugins, anything that makes other engineers faster. 

• A track record of using AI tools to ship things meaningfully faster — bonus points if you can talk about where the approach broke down and what you did about it. 

    

What success looks like 

First 90 days — shipping production crawlers independently, comfortable in our toolchain, and starting to weigh in on how the team works. 

By six months — picking up bigger automation initiatives: extending internal tools, owning a problem area, or helping us push our AI-assisted workflows further.