Search Engineer

Role Description

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.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building production backend or infra systems
• Must be authorized to work in the US or eligible remote-hire regions

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

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)
• 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)
• Life & Disability insurance — Employer-paid short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance
• Supplemental options — Optional accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity, and voluntary life insurance
• 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)
• 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

Interview Process

• Application Review — Send us your work and a quick note on why this excites you.
• Intro Chat (~25 min) — A quick conversation to get to know each other.
• Technical Chat (~45 min) — We'll dig into a real problem from our world.
• Founder Chat (~25 min) — Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work.
• Paid Work Trial (1-2 weeks) — Work with the search team on a real, scoped piece of the product.
• Decision — We move fast after the trial.