Crawling at scale
High-volume extraction that stays up under load: millions of requests, shifting targets, fragile sites, and the chaos of the open web — with observability so you know when something breaks.
Crawling · unblocking · systems
I build crawlers and unblocking systems at scale, and I play with AI.
Technical Lead and Architect at Crawlbase. Shipping spiders, bypass layers, and pipelines that survive the messy open web.
On the side of the desk: helping teams ship data pipelines that touch billions of pages — not only fetchers and parsers, but the full stack that tackles blocks: WAFs, fingerprints, CAPTCHAs, proxy routing, and the kind of targeted bypass work that turns a hard “no” into a reliable feed.
Billions of pages, one stubborn engineer
End-to-end work: I build spiders and the systems that unblock them — custom layers for hard targets, pragmatic bypass paths when the work is allowed, proxy orchestration, and clean structured delivery you can plug straight into prod.
- ···Pages crawled & parsed across client projects
- ···HTTP & unblocking journeys: retries, fingerprints, redirects & proxies
- ···AI extraction, clean-up & structured output passes
Cumulative numbers across Crawlbase operations and consulting projects. Need crawlers, unblocking, or both? Hit Say hello.
What I’m usually doing
Crawlers, unblocking, and the glue in between — day job, consulting, and side experiments.
Crawlers & fetchers
Spiders and resilient fetchers that ship real data: parsing, scheduling, retries, and the hard edge where bot-detection actually hurts — not demo scripts that stop at hello world.
Unblocking & bypass systems
The systems that get you past the wall: WAFs, fingerprint and session tricks, smarter proxy and header strategy, CAPTCHA paths where allowed — and pragmatic custom layers when an off-the-shelf scraper is not enough.
AI & agents
Models plus agentic flows: tools, planners, and retries that summarize messy pages, structure extraction, and run multi-step crawl and research tasks without a human in every loop.
Automations & APIs
Glue code, internal tools, and HTTP APIs in whatever stack fits: wiring crawlers, unblocking jobs, and backends so teams can trigger, observe, and trust the pipeline.
Data pipelines
Ingest, clean, enrich, store, and deliver, so scraped and automated output lands in queues, warehouses, or products people actually use.
Jamal AwadTech Lead & Architect
About
Crawlers, blocks, and the systems in between
I’ve spent the better part of a decade building crawling systems from the ground up — but the interesting part is rarely only the spider: it’s the layers that unblock stubborn targets, adapt when defenses change, and still hand you clean, structured data.
At Crawlbase, I lead architecture for large-scale crawling and anti-bot mitigation: proxy orchestration, bypass and recovery paths, retry logic, and pipelines that tie fetch, unblock, and deliver together. Before that, I shipped complete projects for clients — e-commerce, real estate, finance, travel — end-to-end: spiders, custom unblocking work, automations, scheduling, and production-ready datasets.
On the side, I experiment with AI agents and agentic workflows — where models genuinely help extraction and research, vs. where they’re noise on top of a broken fetch path.
- 10+ years in web crawling & data extraction
- Billions of pages — and countless unblock paths
- Full stack — spider, bypass, delivery
- Remote — working with teams worldwide
What people say
From teams who needed data out the door — crawlers and the systems that clear the blocks.
“We needed 40M product pages crawled weekly across six markets. Jamal built the spider fleet, hardening layer for the worst anti-bot markets, and delivered clean CSVs to our S3 bucket on schedule. Our data team finally stopped complaining.”
“Our stack was failing on 60% of targets after Cloudflare updates. Jamal didn't just patch crawlers — he rebuilt the unblocking pipeline in two weeks: fingerprinting, smarter retries, residential fallback, and custom logic where generic tools died. Failure rate dropped to under 3%.”
“Jamal ships the full loop: scheduling, monitoring, alerts, and API delivery. But the difference was the blocking work — when everyone else shrugged at 403s, he had a system. Fourteen months, zero missed deliveries.”