Product Engineer Scrape

Youll own Firecrawls flagship product the scrape endpoint that turns any URL into clean LLM-ready data with a single API call. Its the product 100k developers know us for the one that put Firecrawl on the map and the one every new AI app reaches for when it needs the web as input. Your job is to make it unbeatable: faster more reliable better formatted and more delightful to integrate than anything else on the market.

This isnt a maintenance role. Scrape is the front door and the front door has to be the best part of the house. At a 26-person company the gap between the scraper works and developers cant imagine using anything else 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 shipping developer-facing products ideally in scraping crawling browser automation or data infrastructure

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 120k 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

Own the scrape product end-to-end. Scrape is the endpoint developers integrate first and the one they depend on most. You own how it feels response format latency reliability error messages the markdown quality structured extraction every parameter every edge case. If a developer has a bad time with /v1/scrape thats on you. If they have a great one thats on you too.

Make just works actually true. The web is messy. JavaScript-heavy SPAs anti-bot walls dynamic content infinite scrolls weird charsets broken HTML. Developers dont want to know about any of it they want clean markdown. Your job is to push the just works rate from great to unbeatable one long-tail failure mode at a time.

Obsess over the output not just the fetch. Pulling the HTML is table stakes. The product is the markdown its structure cleanliness fidelity to the source and how well it drops into an LLM prompt. Youll make calls about what gets stripped what gets preserved how tables and code blocks are handled when to flatten vs. when to keep structure. These are product decisions disguised as engineering ones.

Ship structured extraction that developers trust. Schema-based extraction JSON mode prompt-based extraction developers use these to skip the LLM call entirely. They have to be reliable enough to build on. Youll iterate on the extraction surface until developers stop writing their own post-processing.

Dogfood relentlessly. You build with the API before you ship changes to it. You feel the friction first. You read every GitHub issue every Discord thread every support ticket that touches scrape not because someone asked you to but because thats where the product signal lives.

Run fast product experiments. Form a hypothesis about what would make scrape better instrument it ship it measure it decide quickly. Youre comfortable making calls with imperfect data because waiting for perfect data means shipping nothing and the competition isnt waiting.

Raise the bar on developer experience. Firecrawls users are technical. They notice when response formats drift when error codes are unhelpful when docs lag behind 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 markdown quality 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.

Deep instincts for scraping and the messy web. This isnt abstract to you. You know why headless browsers fail what anti-bot systems actually do when to render JS and when not to why some sites need stealth and others dont. Youve felt the pain of a flaky scraper at 3am and you have opinions about how to build something that doesnt break.

Speaks both product and engineering fluently. You can read a rendering pipeline and understand its implications for the developer experience. You can write the API spec and implement it yourself. You dont need a PM to tell you what matters. You connect the dots from this 99th percentile latency is creeping up to this is a product problem 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 what makes data LLM-ready. Youve built things on top of LLMs. You know what clean context looks like and what a noisy context window does to a model. You have intuitions about markdown structure what to keep what to drop and how to make a scraped page feel native to an LLM prompt 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/cost tradeoffs. Youre not just building features youre building infrastructure thousands of developers depend on every day.

Backgrounds that tend to do well: Engineers whove owned scraping crawling or data extraction products at developer-tools or data-infra companies. Full-stack engineers with a strong backend bias whove shipped APIs used by thousands of developers. Browser automation engineers (Playwright Puppeteer Chromium internals) who got frustrated by the distance between their work and the user experience. People whove built on top of Firecrawl Apify Bright Data or rolled their own scraping stack and cared enough about the product layer to go deeper than the fetch.

What Were NOT Looking For

Great engineers who dont care about DX. If you build technically excellent systems but think API ergonomics markdown quality and documentation are someone elses problem this isnt the role. The product experience is 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 browser internals and tune out when the conversation shifts to API design or vice versa this wont be a fit. This role requires you to hold both.

Slow shippers. Scrape is the most-used product we have which means the feedback loop is fast and the cost of slow iteration is high. We need someone who can take a customer pain point to a shipped fix 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 scraping or data-extraction products APIs developer-facing tools. 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 scraping products and APIs youve built: architecture decisions DX tradeoffs how youve handled the long tail of the messy web. Well explore a live problem how youd improve a real piece of the scrape product end-to-end. 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 scrape 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 product 100k developers already love and make it the kind of thing they cant imagine working without this is your shot.

Apply now.

Required Experience:

IC