Search Engineer

Firecrawl•San Francisco, CA

1d•$190,000 - $260,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Firecrawl is seeking engineers to build the systems that will turn the open web into a search index. The search product is one of the company's fastest-growing surfaces, and they need engineers who can make crawling, ranking, and retrieval fast, reliable, and cheap at scale. The role involves owning real infrastructure from day one. Firecrawl's mission is to provide the easiest way to turn the web into data AI agents can use, with one API call converting any URL into clean, LLM-ready markdown or structured data. The company has achieved significant ARR growth and has a large developer community. They are a small, high-impact team focused on building infrastructure for AI companies.

Requirements

You've built and operated backend or distributed systems at real scale
You care about latency, cost, and correctness in equal measure
You're comfortable owning ambiguous problems and turning them into shipped systems
You move fast and close the loop — you'd rather ship, measure, and iterate than perfect on paper
Must be authorized to work in the US or eligible remote-hire regions. We are not sponsoring visas at this time.

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

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

Benefits

Salary that makes sense — $190,000–$260,000/year, based on impact, not tenure
Own a piece — Up to 0.05% equity in what you're 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 $1,000/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
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 life's 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
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