Design Engineer
San Francisco, CA - USA
Job Summary
Design Engineer
Youll own the look feel and experience of Firecrawl across our entire platform from the core product UI to docs playgrounds and marketing pages. You take ideas from rough sketches to production-ready pages and you ship them fast. If you care about motion precision and performance youll thrive here.
Salary Range: $160000$240000/year (Range shown is for U.S.-based employees in San Francisco CA. Compensation outside the U.S. is adjusted fairly based on your countrys cost of living. You can explore how we calculate this here: Range: Up to 0.15%
Location: San Francisco CA or Remote (Americas UTC-3 to UTC-10)
Job Type: Full-Time
Experience: 3 years
Visa: US Citizenship/Visa required
About Firecrawl
Firecrawl is the easiest way to extract data from the web. Developers use us to reliably convert URLs into LLM-ready markdown or structured data with a single API just a year weve hit 8 figures in ARR and 100k GitHub stars by building the fastest way for developers to get LLM-ready data.
Were a small fast-moving technical team building essential infrastructure super-intelligence will use to gather data on the web. We ship fast and deep.
What Youll Do
Build beautiful fast UIs using Tailwind and Framer Motion
Create and optimize product pages and interactive playgrounds
Maintain and scale our internal design system across all surfaces
Own UX and polish across marketing docs and app interfaces
Collaborate directly with founders to ship high-impact features
Lead proof-of-concept work for new ideas and experiences
What Were Looking For
A builder with a sharp eye and obsessive attention to motion interaction and polish.
You go from concept to finished product independently. You dont wait for a spec to be perfect you ship iterate and make things better every day. Youve worked in fast environments before and you like it that way.
Strong with Tailwind and Framer Motion. These are our core stack. You dont need to be an expert in all three on day one but you should be dangerous in at least two and excited to go deep on the third.
Obsessed with developer experience. Our users are developers. You understand that great design in a dev tools context means clarity speed and zero friction not flashy gimmicks.
You ship live projects with real users. Portfolio pieces are fine. But we want to see things people actually use not just Dribbble shots that never saw production.
Backgrounds that often do well: Design engineers at developer tools companies frontend engineers with strong design instincts designers who code and ship their own work or indie builders whove launched products end-to-end.
What Were NOT Looking For
Pure designers who dont code. This role lives in the codebase. If you need an engineer to implement your designs this isnt the right fit.
People who optimize for pixel-perfect mockups over shipped product. We value speed and iteration. If you spend a week in Figma before touching code youll be frustrated here.
Someone who needs a lot of structure or process. We dont have a design team a sprint cadence or a formal review pipeline. Youll get a problem some context and the trust to go solve it.
A Note On Pace
We operate at an absurd level of urgency because the window for what were building wont stay open forever. If that excites you keep reading. If it doesnt no hard feelings but this role probably isnt for you.
Benefits & Perks
Available to all employees
Salary that makes sense $150000$200000/year (SF U.S.-based) based on impact not tenure
Own a piece Up to 0.1% equity in what youre 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 $1000/year toward anything that helps you grow professionally
Team offsites A change of scenery minus the trust falls
Sabbatical 3 paid months off after 4 years do something fun and new
Available to US-based full-time employees
Full coverage no red tape Medical dental and vision (100% for employees 50% for spouse/kids) no weird loopholes just care that works
Life & Disability insurance Employer-paid short-term disability long-term disability and life insurance coverage for lifes curveballs
Supplemental options Optional accident critical illness hospital indemnity and voluntary life insurance for extra peace of mind
Doctegrity telehealth Talk to a doctor from your couch
401(k) plan Retirement might be a ways off but future-you will thank you
Pre-tax benefits Access to FSAs and commuter 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 stuff and a quick note on why this excites you. Show us what youve shipped live products design systems interactive pages anything with real users. A portfolio link a GitHub repo or a deployed project goes a long way.
Intro Chat (20 min) A quick conversation to get to know you.
Deep Dive Chat (45 min) Show us your best work and tackle a small design engineering challenge live. Were looking for taste speed and how you think through tradeoffs not trivia.
Founder Chat (30 min) Culture pace ownership and how you like to work. Time for your questions too.
Paid Work Trial (12 weeks) Test drive the real thing: build something real with us a page a component a playground with measurable output.
Decision We move fast after the trial.
If you want to own the design and experience layer of one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure startups and you ship code not just mockups this is your shot.
Apply now.
Required Experience:
IC
About Company
The web crawling, scraping, and search API for AI. Built for scale. Firecrawl delivers the entire internet to AI agents and builders. Clean, structured, and ready to reason with.