Search Engineer at Firecrawl — San Francisco, CA

# Search Engineer

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.

Salary Range: $190,000-$260,000/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 building production backend or infra systems

# About Firecrawl

# What You'll 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 We're Looking For

• 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

# What We're 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

# Benefits & Perks

## Available to all employees

• Salary that makes sense — $190,000–$260,000/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 — search systems, indexing pipelines, ranking improvements. 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 — crawling at scale, ranking quality, or driving down cost per query — 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 search team on a real, scoped piece of the product — 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 you want to build search infrastructure that serves the whole web at a cost that shouldn't be possible, you should join us.

👉 Apply now.