​Job Type: Contract / Project-BasedStack Required: Apify (Actors/Crawlee), Python or Node.js, Playwright/Cheerio, Webhooks, PostgreSQL/JSON storage.

​Project Overview

​We are scaling our secondary-market capital equipment operations and need an experienced web scraping engineer to architect, build, and deploy an automated monitoring pipeline.​The goal is to track, parse, and structure active lots, closed sale prices, and liquidation details for pre-owned medical, surgical, and diagnostic assets across major industrial auction aggregators (such as HiBid, GovDeals, specialized liquidators, and hospital surplus portals). ​Rather than a one-time scrape, this model needs to run continuously or on dynamic schedules, normalize unstructured equipment titles/descriptions, and pipe clean JSON payloads directly via webhooks into our internal database/workflow automation tools (e.g., Make.com or custom endpoints).

​Key Responsibilities

1. ​Actor Development & Custom Scrapers: Build or customize resilient Apify Actors using JavaScript/Node.js (or Python with Crawlee/Playwright) to extract item details, asset categories, closing times, starting bids, and location data.
2. ​Anti-Bot & Pagination Bypass: Implement advanced proxy rotation strategies (residential vs. datacenter), adaptive rate-limiting, and fingerprint spoofing to handle strict anti-scraping measures on target auction domains.
3. ​Data Normalization & Cleaning: Write extraction logic to parse messy, unstructured equipment descriptions (e.g., extracting manufacturers like Skytron, Stryker, GE, or Siemens, model numbers, and condition notes from free-text titles).
4. ​Pipeline Integration: Configure automated scheduling, error alerts (via Slack/Email), and webhook dispatching so new inventory hits our staging environment in real time.
5. ​Maintenance & Monitoring: Set up actor health checks and self-healing selectors to handle structural layout changes on high-frequency target sites.

​Required Qualifications

• ​Proven Apify Experience: Demonstrated portfolio of custom Apify Actors built using SDK/Crawlee, with deep knowledge of datasets, key-value stores, and Actor lifecycle management.
• ​Auction & Directory Expertise: Prior experience scraping pagination-heavy, JavaScript-rendered auction platforms (experience with platforms like HiBid or industrial liquidation sites is a major plus).
• ​Robust Anti-Scraping Know-How: Hands-on experience managing proxy pools, bypassing CAPTCHAs, and handling session cookies/headers.
• ​Data Parsing Skills: Strong RegEx or lightweight NLP parsing skills to pull structured equipment attributes (OEM, model, serial numbers) out of unstructured text fields.
• ​API & Webhook Integration: Ability to output clean JSON schemas and connect runs to external APIs or automation workflows.

​To Apply, Please Include:

1. ​Links to 2–3 successful Apify Actors or scraping projects you’ve built (GitHub profiles or Apify console links preferred).
2. ​A brief summary of how you handle rate-limiting and proxy rotation on stubborn, heavily-defended target sites.
3. ​Your estimated timeline and milestone breakdown to deliver a functional MVP monitoring a test list of auction URLs