engineering
Posted Apr 2Product Engineer — Search
at Firecrawl
San Francisco, United StatesHybrid
elasticsearch120k
Responsibilities
- Own the search API end-to-end.
Requirements
- experience at Firecrawl — taking the retrieval and ranking improvements coming out of research and shipping them as a product developers can't stop using.
- Experience: 3+ years in applied RL, ML engineering, or model training — with production systems Visa: US Citizenship/Visa required for SF; N/A for Remote ABOUT FIRECRAWL Firecrawl is the easiest way to extract data from the web.
- In just a year, we've hit 8 figures in ARR and 120k+ GitHub stars by building the fastest way for developers to get LLM-ready data.
- You ship the whole thing: the API change, the docs update, the example that makes it obvious.
- You're the person who notices when something is confusing before a user files a GitHub issue about it.
- You read every GitHub issue, every Discord thread, every support ticket that touches search — not because someone asked you to, but because that's where the product signal lives.
- You've built APIs that developers loved and you know the difference between an API that works and one that delights.
- You can read a ranking algorithm and understand its implications for the search experience.
- You can write the API spec and implement it yourself.
- You don't need a PM to tell you what matters or an ML engineer to explain why a retrieval change is significant.
- You have intuitions about query understanding, result ranking, and when semantic search beats keyword search — and you've built products that put those intuitions to work.
- We need someone who can take something from "this ranking model is better" to "this is live in the API with docs and an example" in days, not sprints.
- If you're not the kind of engineer who builds side projects with APIs like ours, reads the docs critically, and notices when something feels off — you'll miss the signal that makes this role work.
- benefits — Access to FSAs and commuter
- A GitHub link, a product you've built, or a write-up of something you're proud of goes a long way.
- Deep Dive Chat (~45 min) — Go deep on search products and APIs you've built: architecture decisions, DX tradeoffs, how you've translated technical improvements into product changes.
- We'll explore a live problem — how you'd take a retrieval improvement and ship it as a better developer experience at Firecrawl.
- We're looking for product instincts, technical depth, and the ability to hold both at once.
- experience at one of the fastest-growing developer infrastructure companies in AI — and you're the kind of engineer who won't stop until it's great — this is your shot. 👉 Apply now.
Benefits
- Salary Range: $180,000 to $290,000/year (Range shown is for U.S.-based employees in San Francisco, CA.
- Compensation outside the U.S. is adjusted fairly based on your country's cost of living.) Equity Range: Up to 0.15% Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote (Americas, UTC-3 to UTC-10) Job Type: Full-Time
- BENEFITS & PERKS AVAILABLE TO ALL EMPLOYEES - Salary that makes sense — $180,000–$290,000/year, based on impact, not tenure - Own a piece — Up to 0.15% equity in what you're helping build - Generous PTO — 15 days mandatory, anything after 24 days, just ask (holidays excluded); take the time you need to recharge - Parental leave — 12 weeks fully paid, for moms and dads - Wellness stipend — $100/month for the gym, therapy, massages, or whatever keeps you human - Learning & Development — Expense up to
- benefits (US-only) to help your wallet out a bit - Pet insurance — Because fur babies are family too AVAILABLE TO SF-BASED EMPLOYEES - SF HQ perks — Snacks, drinks, team lunches, intense ping pong, and peak startup energy - E-Bike transportation — A loaner electric bike to get you around the city, on us INTERVIEW PROCESS Application Review — Send us your work and a quick note on why this excites you.
Additional details
- This isn't a pure research role and it isn't a pure backend role.
- You sit at the intersection: you understand how the systems work deeply enough to improve them, and you care about how they feel to use obsessively enough to make them great.
- At a 26-person company, the gap between research and shipped product is exactly one person. You're that person.
- Developers use us to reliably convert URLs into LLM-ready markdown or structured data with a single API call.
- We're a small, fast-moving, technical team building essential infrastructure superintelligence will use to gather data on the web.
- WHAT YOU'LL DO Ship search improvements that developers notice.
- Take retrieval and ranking improvements from research and turn them into product changes that make developers say "this just works." You know that a 200ms latency improvement isn't just a benchmark win — it's a better product.
- You're responsible for how Firecrawl's search endpoint feels to integrate, use, and build on.
- That means response format, latency, error handling, pagination, filtering — every surface a developer touches.
- You work closely with the Search/IR and RL Research Engineers.