About NewsCatcher

NewsCatcher is building the largest & most accurate database of news articles published online. Our solution crawls millions of web pages daily to detect over 1,000,000 news articles published online each day.

We deal with unstructured text data parsed from HTML pages.

You can read more about how NewsCatcher works via this link.

Today, we're a team of 2 technical co-founders. We're looking for our first hire: an experienced engineer, who can deliver end-to-end data solutions.

As our first engineering hire you will have a key influence on our new infrastructure. You'll actively participate in the technical design process, bringing your expertise and analysis to help make data-driven decisions

We're fast-growing, so if you can see yourself running your own team in a year we're a great place for you.

Our tech stack:

AWS, GCP, OCI
Python (including asynchronous workloads)
Docker & k8s
Pub/sub, SQS, Kafka
Elasticsearch
MongoDB/Dynamo
PostgreSQL

Your skills

Strong programming skills in Python
Experience in web scraping, web crawling
Python Packages: Scrapy, requests, bs4, re, selenium, flask
Knowledge with Docker & Kubernetes ecosystems
Experienced with Cloud platforms such as GCP/AWS/OCI
Experienced working with event-driven/streaming architectures
Monitoring (Elasticsearch/Datadog)
Github for code versioning
- Optional:
  - Javascript
  - Kubernetes
  - Kafka

Example of tasks

Improve existing web article extraction algorithms
We have our own generic extraction algorithm. You will be asked to improve it so it can extract data from more news sources. The most valuable data we extract is published date, title, content.

Write extraction algorithm for specific news websites
Some websites have a unique web structure, but we still need data from them. If our generic extraction does not process those websites properly, you will be asked to come up with your own method.

Create an algorithm that can distinguish an article webpage from another.
While crawling a website, we go through all the pages it contains. From the "About Us" page to "Our sponsors". Your goal will be to identify those pages which are news articles.

Improve News URLS finding algorithms
If we get an URL of a news source that is not yet in our database, meaning we never extracted anything from it, we have algorithms that search for all ways of finding news articles URL. You will be working on improving it.