Product Engineer — Search

Overview You\'ll own the developer-facing search experience at Firecrawl — taking the retrieval and ranking improvements coming out of research and shipping them as a product developers can\'t stop using. This isn\'t a pure research role and it isn\'t a pure backend role. You sit at the intersection: you understand how the systems work deeply enough to improve them, and you care about how they feel to use obsessively enough to make them great. At a 26-person company, the gap between research and shipped product is exactly one person. You\'re that person. Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote (Americas, UTC-3 to UTC-10) · Job Type: Full-Time Experience: 3+ years in applied RL, ML engineering, or model training — with production systems Visa: US Citizenship/Visa required for SF; N/A for Remote Salary Range: $180,000–$290,000/year (Range shown is for U.S.-based employees. Compensation outside the U.S. is adjusted fairly based on your country\'s cost of living. You can explore how we calculate this here: Equity Range: Up to 0.15% About Firecrawl Firecrawl is the easiest way to extract data from the web. Developers use us to reliably convert URLs into LLM-ready markdown or structured data with a single API call. In just a year, we\'ve hit 8 figures in ARR and 100k+ GitHub stars by building the fastest way for developers to get LLM-ready data. We\'re a small, fast-moving, technical team building essential infrastructure superintelligence will use to gather data on the web. We ship fast and deep. Responsibilities Ship search improvements that developers notice. Take retrieval and ranking improvements from research and turn them into product changes that make developers say \"this just works.\" You know that a 200ms latency improvement isn\'t just a benchmark win — it\'s a better product. You ship the whole thing: the API change, the docs update, the example that makes it obvious. Own the search API end-to-end. You\'re responsible for how Firecrawl\'s search endpoint feels to integrate, use, and build on. That means response format, latency, error handling, pagination, filtering — every surface a developer touches. Dogfood relentlessly. You build things with the API before you ship them. You read every GitHub issue, every Discord thread, every support ticket that touches search. Translate research into product decisions. You work closely with the Search/IR and RL Research Engineers. You understand their work well enough to make good product calls about what to prioritize, what to expose to users, and what to keep under the hood. Run fast product experiments. You form a hypothesis about what would make search better for developers, instrument it, ship it, measure it, and decide quickly. Raise the bar on developer experience. You notice inconsistencies in response formats, error messages, and documentation — and fix them before users notice. What We're Looking For Obsessive about developer experience. You think about DX like a designer thinks about pixels. Latency, response structure, error messages, API ergonomics — these matter to you on a visceral level. Speaks both product and engineering fluently. You can read a ranking algorithm and understand its implications for the search experience, write the API spec, and implement it yourself. Hands-on builder who ships. You write code. You own features from design to deployment. You\'re comfortable with ambiguity and you ship something, learn from it, and iterate. Has a feel for search as a product. You understand recall vs. precision, query understanding, result ranking, and when semantic search beats keyword search. Brings production instincts. You\'ve operated systems under real load and know how to instrument what matters and balance latency and quality. Backgrounds that tend to do well: Engineers who have owned search or discovery features at developer-tools companies; full-stack engineers with strong backend bias; engineers from search infrastructure teams who care about the product layer. What We\'re NOT Looking For Great engineers who don\'t care about DX. API ergonomics and documentation are part of the role. People who need a PM. You define what good looks like and own the outcome. Specialists who only work on one layer. This role requires holding both backend and developer-facing aspects. Slow shippers. Move from ranking improvement to live API with docs and example in days, not sprints. People who don\'t use the product. You should build side projects with APIs like ours and read the docs critically. Benefits & Perks Salary that makes sense — $180,000–$290,000/year, based on impact, not tenure Own a piece — Up to 0.15% 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 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 Interview Process Application Review — Send work and a quick note on why this excites you. Show us what you\'ve shipped — search features, APIs, developer-facing products. Intro Chat (~20 min) Deep Dive Chat (~45 min) Founder Chat (~30 min) Paid Work Trial (1–2 weeks) Decision — We move fast after the trial. If you want to own the search experience at one of the fastest-growing developer infrastructure companies in AI — and you\'re the kind of engineer who won\'t stop until it\'s great — this is your shot. Apply now. #J-18808-Ljbffr Mendable