Search Engineer

Youll build the systems that let anyone turn the open web into a search index. Firecrawls search product is one of our fastest-growing surfaces and we need engineers who can make crawling ranking and retrieval fast reliable and cheap at scale. Youll own real infrastructure from day one not tickets in a backlog.

Salary Range: $190000-$260000/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 0.05%

Location: San Francisco CA or Remote (Americas UTC-3 to UTC-10)

Job Type: Full-Time

Experience: 3 years building production backend or infra systems

Visa: Must be authorized to work in the US or eligible remote-hire regions. We are not sponsoring visas at this time.

About Firecrawl

Firecrawl is the easiest way to turn the web into data AI agents can use. One API call converts any URL into clean LLM-ready markdown or structured data - the boring-hard problem everyone building with LLMs eventually hits solved.

We hit 8 figures in ARR in year one and more than doubled it in year two. We have 147k GitHub stars and developers agents and category-defining AI companies build on us every day. Growth like this is rare and were just getting started.

Were a small team punching far above our weight. Everyone here owns a real piece of the product and company end to end and runs it themselves - no hiding behind process or headcount.

This is a place for people who want to work at the frontier: an AI company building the infrastructure other AI companies run on not one bolting AI onto an existing product. We move fast go deep and are building the tools superintelligence will rely on to gather data from the web.

What Youll Do

• Design and build the crawling indexing and retrieval systems behind Firecrawl Search

• Push down latency and cost per query while search volume grows

• Improve ranking quality and freshness for LLM-driven retrieval

• Own services end to end design ship monitor and iterate in production

• Work directly with the Head of Search and the rest of the search team on the roadmap

What Were Looking For

• Youve built and operated backend or distributed systems at real scale

• You care about latency cost and correctness in equal measure

• Youre comfortable owning ambiguous problems and turning them into shipped systems

• You move fast and close the loop youd rather ship measure and iterate than perfect on paper

What Were NOT Looking For

• Someone who needs a fully-specced ticket to start

• Someone who wants to specialize narrowly and hand off everything else

• Someone who optimizes for process over shipping

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 $190000$260000/year based on impact not tenure

• Own a piece Up to 0.05% 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 all parents

• 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 built search systems indexing pipelines ranking improvements. We care about what youve shipped not where you went to school.

Intro Chat (25 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.

Technical Chat (45 min) Well dig into a real problem from our world crawling at scale ranking quality or driving down cost per query and talk through how youd approach it. Come ready to think out loud; we care how you reason not whether you memorized the answer.

Founder Chat (25 min) Culture pace ownership and how you like to work. Time for your questions too.

Paid Work Trial (1-2 weeks) Work with the search team on a real scoped piece of the product paid at a contractor rate. Its the truest signal for both sides: you see what building at Firecrawl actually feels like and we see how you ship. Remote-friendly and well flex around your current commitments.

Decision We move fast after the trial.

If you want to build search infrastructure that serves the whole web at a cost that shouldnt be possible you should join us.

Apply now.

Required Experience:

IC