Product Engineer Search

Youll own the developer-facing search experience at Firecrawl taking the retrieval and ranking improvements coming out of research and shipping them as a product developers cant stop using. This isnt a pure research role and it isnt 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. Youre that person.

Salary Range: $180000 to $290000/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.)

Equity 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 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. 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

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 isnt just a benchmark win its a better product. You ship the whole thing: the API change the docs update the example that makes it obvious.

Own the search API end-to-end. Youre responsible for how Firecrawls search endpoint feels to integrate use and build on. That means response format latency error handling pagination filtering every surface a developer touches. Youre the person who notices when something is confusing before a user files a GitHub issue about it.

Dogfood relentlessly. You build things with the API before you ship them. You feel the friction before your users do. You read every GitHub issue every Discord thread every support ticket that touches search not because someone asked you to but because thats where the product signal lives.

Translate research into product decisions. You work closely with the Search/IR and RL Research Engineers. You understand their work well enough to make good product calls about what to prioritize what to expose to users and what to keep under the hood. You ask good questions. You push back when something technically elegant would make the API worse.

Run fast product experiments. You form a hypothesis about what would make search better for developers instrument it ship it measure it and decide quickly. Youre comfortable making calls with imperfect data because waiting for perfect data means shipping nothing.

Raise the bar on developer experience. Firecrawls users are technical. They have high standards. They notice when response formats are inconsistent when error messages are unhelpful when documentation doesnt match behavior. You notice too and you fix it before they have to ask.

What Were Looking For

Obsessive about developer experience. You think about DX the way a designer thinks about pixels. Latency response structure error messages API ergonomics these things matter to you on a visceral level. Youve built APIs that developers loved and you know the difference between an API that works and one that delights.

Speaks both product and engineering fluently. 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 dont need a PM to tell you what matters or an ML engineer to explain why a retrieval change is significant. You connect those dots on your own.

Hands-on builder who ships. You write code. You own features from design to deployment. Youre comfortable with ambiguity and you dont need a perfectly scoped ticket to make progress. You ship something learn from it and iterate.

Has a feel for search as a product. Youve thought seriously about what makes search good not just fast or accurate but genuinely useful. You understand the difference between recall and precision and why developers care about both. You have intuitions about query understanding result ranking and when semantic search beats keyword search and youve built products that put those intuitions to work.

Brings production instincts. Youve operated systems under real load. You know what breaks first how to instrument what matters and how to make good latency/quality tradeoffs. Youre not just building features youre building infrastructure developers depend on.

Backgrounds that tend to do well: Engineers whove owned search or discovery features at developer-tools companies. Full-stack engineers with a strong backend bias whove shipped APIs used by thousands of developers. Engineers from search infrastructure teams who got frustrated by the distance between their work and the user experience. People whove built on top of Elasticsearch Vespa or vector databases and cared enough about the product layer to go deeper than the query interface.

What Were NOT Looking For

Great engineers who dont care about DX. If you build technically excellent systems but think API ergonomics and documentation are someone elses problem this isnt the role. The product experience is part of the job not an afterthought.

People who need a PM. Theres no product manager between you and the work. You define what good looks like you decide what to prioritize and you own the outcome. If thats uncomfortable youll struggle here.

Specialists who only work on one layer. If youre only interested in backend systems and tune out when the conversation shifts to how something is exposed to developers or vice versa this wont be a fit. This role requires you to hold both.

Slow shippers. The research team will produce improvements faster than a slow product cycle can absorb them. 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.

People who dont use the product. If youre not the kind of engineer who builds side projects with APIs like ours reads the docs critically and notices when something feels off youll miss the signal that makes this role work.

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 $180000$290000/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. Show us what youve shipped search features APIs developer-facing products. A GitHub link a product youve built or a write-up of something youre proud of goes a long way.

Intro Chat (20 min) A quick conversation to get to know each other before we go deep. Well talk about what youve been working on what drew you to Firecrawl and what youre looking for in your next role. Time for your questions too.

Deep Dive Chat (45 min) Go deep on search products and APIs youve built: architecture decisions DX tradeoffs how youve translated technical improvements into product changes. Well explore a live problem how youd take a retrieval improvement and ship it as a better developer experience at Firecrawl. Were looking for product instincts technical depth and the ability to hold both at once.

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

Paid Work Trial (12 weeks) Tackle a real search product problem with production implications. We evaluate on shipping speed product judgment and how well you balance technical quality with developer experience.

Decision We move fast after the trial.

If you want to own the search experience at one of the fastest-growing developer infrastructure companies in AI and youre the kind of engineer who wont stop until its great this is your shot.

Apply now.

Required Experience:

IC