Key Responsibilities:
1. Crawler Development and Maintenance:
- Design, develop, and maintain reliable web crawlers for data collection from social media platforms.
- Optimize crawling algorithms to ensure accurate and efficient data retrieval while adhering to ethical standards and platform policies.
2. Data Management:
- Build data pipelines to clean, process, and store data efficiently.
- Collaborate with data scientists and analysts to ensure high-quality and readily available data for analysis.
3. Integration and Collaboration:
- Integrate crawlers with existing systems and third-party tools to streamline data access and utilization.
- Work closely with other engineering teams to incorporate new features and maintain compatibility across services.
4. Security and Compliance:
- Implement security measures to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with data privacy laws.
- Monitor and adapt to changes in social media platforms' APIs, rules, and regulations.
5. Performance Optimization:
- Analyze and enhance the performance of crawlers, reducing latency and increasing data retrieval efficiency.
- Address challenges related to rate limiting and blocking mechanisms.
6. Technical Leadership:
- Mentor junior developers in crawler development techniques and best practices.
- Provide guidance in architectural decisions for data crawling and management.
Key Skills:
1. Technical Skills:
- Strong programming skills in Python, JavaScript, or other relevant languages.
- Hands-on experience with web scraping libraries and tools such as Beautiful Soup, Scrapy, Selenium, or Puppeteer.
- Familiarity with API development and RESTful services.
2. Experience:
- Proven track record in building web crawlers for social media platforms.
- Understanding of platform-specific challenges, including rate limiting and data structures.
3. Data Skills:
- Experience working with big data tools such as Hadoop and Spark.
- Proficiency with SQL/NoSQL databases.
4. Problem-Solving:
- Ability to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues related to web crawling.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
5. Communication and Leadership:
- Excellent communication skills for effective cross-team collaboration.
- Experience in leading projects or mentoring junior developers.
6. Education:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Advanced degree or specialization in data engineering is a plus.