Product Researcher

Youll be the person who figures out what Firecrawl should build next and why. Right now our engineers are shipping great infrastructure and our support and sales teams are handling inbound well. But the bigger product bets the ones that turn a good tool into a dominant platform are stalling because nobody has the bandwidth to do real customer discovery. We have a state-of-the-art commercial research paper search endpoint with one customer using it. We have answers reranking monitoring strong features that arent getting the focused attention they deserve. You fix that.

This isnt a PM role where you write tickets and manage a backlog. Youre in the field. You talk to customers a lot of them. You find the patterns source the insights and bring them back to the team in a way that changes what we prioritize. Youre the bridge between what developers are actually trying to do and what were building.

Salary Range: $160000$230000/year (Range shown is for U.S.-based employees. 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 in product research customer discovery technical PM or founder-level product work with demonstrated results

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 superintelligence will use to gather data on the web. We ship fast and deep.

What Youll Do

Talk to customers constantly. This is the job. Youre running 15-25 customer conversations a week discovery calls user interviews onboarding sessions churn conversations. Youre not surveying people. Youre having real conversations that uncover what theyre building where theyre stuck and what would make Firecrawl indispensable to their workflow. You develop a sixth sense for what customers say versus what they actually need.

Find the insights that change priorities. You dont just report what customers said you synthesize it. You spot the patterns across dozens of conversations and turn them into clear actionable product recommendations. Heres the use case were missing heres how big it is heres what wed need to build heres why it matters now. You bring receipts.

Own customer discovery for new product surfaces. When the team is exploring a new direction a new endpoint a new pricing model a new market segment youre the person who goes deep. You map the landscape talk to the right people and come back with a clear picture of whether its worth pursuing and how to win. Youve done this at the 0-to-1 stage and youve done it at scale. You know the difference.

Be the voice of the customer in every product conversation. Youre in the room when product and engineering decisions are being made. Not to slow things down to make them sharper. You bring real user context that prevents the team from building technically impressive things nobody asked for.

Close the feedback loop. When the team ships something based on your research you go back to the customers who informed it. You validate. You measure. You learn. Discovery isnt a one-time phase its a continuous cycle that compounds the more you do it.

Create content from customer conversations. The best product research doubles as marketing. Customer stories use case write-ups product positioning insights you naturally produce content that helps the team sell and market not just build.

What Were Looking For

Ex-founder energy. Youve built something from scratch ideally in dev tools or technical infrastructure. You know what it feels like to talk to your first 100 customers and figure out product-market fit by hand. That instinct doesnt come from reading about it. YC background is a major plus.

Genuinely technical. You dont need to be writing production code but you need to understand the product deeply enough to have credible conversations with developers. Engineer should be somewhere in your background or you should be the kind of person who can vibe-code a working prototype and talk fluently about APIs SDKs and developer workflows. You cant do discovery on a technical product if you dont understand how it works.

Exceptional communicator. Youre great on camera great on calls great in writing. You can talk to a senior ML engineer about their RAG pipeline and then turn that conversation into a crisp internal brief that changes what the team builds. Youre organized you follow up and people enjoy talking to you.

Executor not theorist. You dont produce 30-page research reports that nobody reads. You produce clear recommendations with enough evidence to act on and you move fast enough that your insights are still relevant when you share them. You bias toward action.

Comfortable with ambiguity. Theres no playbook for this role at Firecrawl yet. Youre building the customer discovery function from scratch. If you need a manager to tell you who to talk to and what questions to ask this isnt the role. If you thrive when you get to figure it out keep reading.

Backgrounds that tend to do well: Ex-founders in the dev tools or API infrastructure space who understand 0-to-1 customer discovery. Technical PMs whove done real discovery work (not just roadmap management). Developer advocates who went deep on product strategy not just content. People from the YC network who understand how early-stage companies find product-market fit. Engineers who realized they were better at talking to customers than writing code and leaned into it.

What Were NOT Looking For

Traditional product managers. If your experience is writing PRDs grooming backlogs and running sprint planning thats not this. We need someone whos in the field not in Jira.

Consultants or freelancers. We need someone embedded in the team who builds deep context over time. If your background is mostly advisory work or short engagements the learning curve will be too steep and the insights too shallow.

People who arent technical enough. If you cant hold your own in a conversation about web scraping API design LLMs or developer infrastructure you wont be credible with our customers and you wont be useful to our engineering team. You dont need to be an engineer. But you need to be deeply comfortable in technical territory.

Conference-circuit types. If your version of customer discovery is networking at events and collecting business cards thats not what we mean. We mean sitting down with a developer understanding their architecture and figuring out where Firecrawl fits or doesnt.

Slow movers. Were a 26-person company competing in a market thats moving at light speed. If you need weeks to synthesize findings or months to build conviction on a recommendation the window will have closed.

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 $160000$230000/year based on impact not tenure

Own a piece Up to 0.15% 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 work and a quick note on why this excites you. We want to see evidence of real customer discovery work case studies product pivots you drove insights that changed a companys direction. A portfolio of I talked to X customers and we built Y as a result goes a long way.

Intro Chat (20 min) A quick conversation to get to know each other. Well talk about what youve been working on your experience with customer discovery and what drew you to Firecrawl. Time for your questions too.

Deep Dive Chat (45 min) Walk us through a real example: a time you ran customer discovery that meaningfully changed what a product team built. Well go deep on your process how you identified who to talk to what you asked how you synthesized and how you got the team to act on it. Then well explore a live scenario at Firecrawl how would you approach discovery for a product surface with low adoption

Founder Chat (30 min) Culture pace ownership and how you like to work. Time for your questions too.

Paid Work Trial (12 weeks) Run a real mini-discovery sprint. Talk to actual Firecrawl customers synthesize what you learn and present a recommendation to the team. We evaluate on the quality of your insights how you run conversations and whether your recommendation would actually change what we build.

Decision We move fast after the trial.

If you want to be the person who figures out what the fastest-growing web data infrastructure company should build next by actually talking to the developers who use it this is your shot.

Apply now.

Required Experience:

IC