Jan Čurn
Founder And CEO at Apify
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJan Čurn is a founder and CEO with 11+ years of hands-on software engineering experience who built Apify into a scalable web scraping and automation platform from the ground up. With a PhD-level background in AI and a track record as a full-stack contributor to core open-source projects like Crawlee and proxy-chain, he blends deep technical chops in TS/JS and systems programming with product-level thinking. Based in San Francisco, he has repeatedly founded and led engineering teams across domains—from motion-blur CGI tooling at VirtualRig Studio to enterprise integrations at Dev tank and identity systems at universities. Jan is comfortable moving between low-level networking (TCP tunneling, proxy chaining) and high-level automation for data extraction, enabling robust solutions for large-scale browser automation and proxy rotation. He pairs academic rigor with practical entrepreneurship (Y Combinator alumnus) and a history of shipping production-grade software that bridges research, tooling, and real-world automation needs.
11 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Gymnázium BudějovickáFellowship, Fellowship at Y CombinatorDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Artificial intelligence, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Artificial intelligence at Trinity College DublinRNDr. Computer science, RNDr. Computer science at Charles University
Stackoverflow
131reputation
24kreached
7answers
0questions
Github Skills (23)
javascript10
typescript10
proxy10
http-proxy10
typescript-types10
nodejs10
typescripts10
automation9
backend9
automations9
frontend9
crawler8
screen-scraping8
scrape8
data-scraping8
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
apify/proxy-chain
Nov 2017 - Aug 2021
Node.js implementation of a proxy server (think Squid) with support for SSL, HTTP/HTTPS, SOCKS5, authentication, and upstream proxy chaining.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:84 reviews, 248 commits, 44 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Jan primarily contributed to the development of a proxy server implementation using Node.js. Their work included initial setup, core logic implementation, and the introduction of various components, such as `HandlerTunnelChain` and TCP tunneling. They focused on establishing and managing connections to upstream proxies, with significant changes in handling HTTP requests, including CONNECT method, and managing the tunnel through TCP. They also worked on fixing errors and improving the robustness of the proxy server by addressing potential issues.
authenticationchainingnodejsproxyproxy-server
apify/crawlee
Aug 2016 - Jan 2022
Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js to build reliable crawlers. In JavaScript and TypeScript. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or GPTs. Download HTML, PDF, JPG, PNG, and other files from websites. Works with Puppeteer, Playwright, Cheerio, JSDOM, and raw HTTP. Both headful and headless mode. With proxy rotation.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 713 commits, 91 PRs in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Jan appears to be a full-stack developer, primarily focused on developing the front-end and back-end. Their contributions included adding initial codebase, implementing core logic, and improving various features. The user also handled the configuration for the back-end. The commits show use of JavaScript and potentially TypeScript to create the backend framework.
aibrowser-automationcheeriocrawleecrawler
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