Company
Firecrawl
Annual salary
$235k – $260k/yr
Location
San Francisco, CA, US
Listed
79d ago
- Experience:
- 3+ years
- Workplace:
- San Francisco, CA (SF HQ) or Toronto, ON (Toronto Hub). On-site, five days a week.
- Visa:
- Visa sponsorship not available
- Equity:
- Competitive equity, details shared during the process.
On-site in San Francisco, CA, US. Visa sponsorship not available.
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What you'll do
- Own ranking quality and relevance for LLM-driven retrieval. This is the core of the role
- Design and build the crawling, indexing, and retrieval systems behind Firecrawl Search
- Push down latency and cost per query while search volume grows
- 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 you need
- 3+ years building search or retrieval systems in production, with ranking and relevance as your primary, owned muscle (BM25, semantic and vector retrieval, re-ranking, RAG)
- You've shipped ranking changes that moved a production metric (relevance, recall, conversion) and can point to the number
- 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
Search Engineer at Firecrawl
You'll build the systems that let anyone turn the open web into a search index. Firecrawl's 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. You'll own real infrastructure from day one, not tickets in a backlog.
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. It's the boring-hard problem everyone building with LLMs eventually hits, solved.
In September 2026 we raised a $75M Series B led by Smash Capital, and we're spending it building the largest repository of knowledge in the world. We hit 8 figures in ARR in year one and more than doubled it in year two. We have 183k+ GitHub stars, putting us in the top 50 repositories of all time, and developers, agents, and category-defining AI companies build on us every day. Growth like this is rare, and we're just getting started.
We're a small team punching far above our weight, working out of SF HQ and our new Toronto Hub. 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. That library is called Alexandria, and it starts now.
What We're NOT Looking For
Backend or distributed-systems engineers whose search work is infrastructure feeding someone else's ranking
Retrieval serving where latency moved but relevance didn't
Vector search wired into an app or side project, without owned relevance work
Someone who needs a fully-specced ticket to start
A Note On Pace
We operate at an absurd level of urgency because the window for what we're building won't stay open forever. If that excites you, keep reading. If it doesn't, no hard feelings, but this role probably isn't for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I apply for the Search Engineer (US) role at Firecrawl? +
Use the Apply for a referral button on this page to send us your LinkedIn and CV. If your experience fits, we'll introduce you to the recruiter filling this role. They'll email you to check you're interested, then put you forward for this job or others that suit you better. It's free.
What does this Firecrawl role pay? +
The listing gives $235k – $260k/yr.
Is this role remote? +
The listing gives the location as San Francisco, CA, US. San Francisco, CA (SF HQ) or Toronto, ON (Toronto Hub). On-site, five days a week. Visa sponsorship not available.
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