Backend Infrastructure Engineer at Firecrawl — San Francisco, CA

# Backend Infrastructure Engineer

You'll work on the infrastructure that makes Firecrawl fast and reliable against a web that constantly changes and fights back. This is deep systems work: keeping success rates high against sites with aggressive defenses, managing the proxy layer that powers reliable data collection at scale, and pushing throughput and reliability under heavy, spiky load. When Firecrawl "just works" on a site that tries hard to stop it, that's this team. You'll own real infrastructure from day one, not tickets in a backlog.

Salary Range: $200,000–$250,000/year (Range shown is for U.S.-based employees in San Francisco, CA. Compensation outside the U.S. is adjusted fairly based on your country's cost of living.)

Job Type: Full-Time

Experience: 3+ years in backend, networking, or infrastructure engineering

# About Firecrawl

# What You'll Do

• Build and maintain the infrastructure that powers reliable data collection at scale
• Improve success rates against sites with aggressive defenses
• Own the health, rotation, and cost efficiency of the proxy layer
• Push throughput and reliability under heavy, spiky, real-world load
• Debug hard, intermittent failures across the stack and make them stay fixed

# What We're Looking For

• You've worked on networking, proxies, or high-throughput backend systems
• You're relentless about reliability and comfortable in messy, adversarial problem spaces
• You can own a system end to end and keep it healthy in production
• You move fast and close the loop - you'd rather ship, measure, and iterate than perfect on paper

# What We're NOT Looking For

• Someone who wants clean, well-defined problems only
• Someone who avoids on-call or production ownership
• Someone who needs the environment to be stable to do their best work

# A Note On Pace

# Benefits & Perks

## Available to all employees

• Salary that makes sense — $200,000–$250,000/year, based on impact, not tenure
• Own a piece — Gain competitive 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

## 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 you've built — proxy systems, networking infrastructure, reliability wins against hard targets. We care about what you've shipped, not where you went to school.

Technical Chat (~45 min) — We'll dig into a real problem from our world — holding reliability under spiky load, keeping a proxy pool healthy, beating a site that fights back — and talk through how you'd approach it. Come ready to think out loud; we care how you reason, not whether you memorized the answer.

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

If making Firecrawl "just work" on the sites that fight back the hardest sounds like your kind of problem, you should join us.

👉 Apply now.