How OnHires helped Knowtrex scale its data engineering team for automotive market intelligence growth

Market intelligence platforms are only as good as the data pipelines feeding them. For a company like Knowtrex, whose products depend on continuously tracking pricing and inventory signals across dozens of automotive markets, the engineering team responsible for data collection and infrastructure is effectively the core of the product, not a support function around it.

As Knowtrex scaled TireCompass and its broader pricing intelligence suite, the company needed to expand its scraping and data infrastructure capacity significantly, bringing on four Python scraping developers alongside a senior scraping infrastructure engineer to keep pace with growing data volume and market coverage. A product & testing manager and a business analyst rounded out the hiring program, reflecting the need to pair technical data capacity with product oversight and market-facing analysis.

OnHires was engaged to lead this hiring effort, with the bulk of the search concentrated on the scraping and infrastructure roles that underpin Knowtrex's entire data supply chain.

Web scraping at the scale Knowtrex operates, tracking pricing and inventory data across 60 markets, is a specialized engineering discipline that goes well beyond writing scripts to pull data from a page. Candidates needed real experience with anti-bot evasion, proxy rotation, data pipeline reliability, and handling the constant maintenance burden of scraping targets that change without notice.

Finding four scraping developers who met that bar within a reasonable timeframe meant sourcing had to move beyond generic "Python developer" search terms into a much narrower pool of engineers with demonstrated scraping-at-scale experience. The senior scraping infrastructure engineer role added a further layer of difficulty, requiring someone who could architect the systems junior scraping developers would build on top of, not just execute individual scraping tasks.

Germany's competitive tech hiring market added additional pressure, with strong data engineering candidates typically fielding multiple offers, while Knowtrex's need to fill four instances of the same specialized role in parallel meant maintaining a consistent evaluation bar across a high volume of candidates without letting pipeline speed erode screening quality.

OnHires calibrated the scraping developer role around concrete technical signals, hands-on experience with proxy management, rate-limit evasion, and pipeline resilience, rather than general web scraping familiarity, building a scorecard the team could apply consistently across all four hires.

Sourcing focused on developers with demonstrated large-scale scraping or data collection experience, evaluated through practical technical assessments designed to surface real pipeline-building skill rather than surface-level scripting ability. For the senior scraping infrastructure engineer, OnHires prioritized candidates with a track record of designing systems other engineers build on, screening for architectural thinking alongside hands-on coding depth.

Weekly hiring syncs kept the four parallel scraping developer searches, along with the infrastructure, product, and analyst roles, moving on a consistent cadence, with fast feedback loops helping Knowtrex secure strong candidates before competing offers came in.

Knowtrex completed 7 hires, anchored by four Python scraping developers and a senior scraping infrastructure engineer who now form the technical core of the company's data collection capacity. A product & testing manager and a business analyst complete the team, giving Knowtrex the product oversight and market analysis capacity to turn expanded data collection into usable pricing intelligence.

With the scraping team scaled to four developers working under senior infrastructure leadership, Knowtrex is positioned to extend its market and geographic coverage without the data pipeline becoming a growth bottleneck.

Roles successfully filled:

When a company's product depends on continuously collected market data, the engineering team behind that data collection needs to be evaluated on very specific, verifiable skills, not general programming ability. Hiring four scraping developers to a consistent bar requires a scorecard built around the actual technical demands of the work.

By anchoring the search in scraping-specific evaluation criteria, OnHires helped Knowtrex build a data engineering team capable of scaling its market intelligence coverage without compromising on reliability.