Product Researcher

Product Researcher You'll be the person who figures out what Firecrawl should build next — and why. Right now, our engineers are shipping great infrastructure, and our support and sales teams are handling inbound well. But the bigger product bets — the ones that turn a good tool into a dominant platform — are stalling because nobody has the bandwidth to do real customer discovery. We have a state-of-the-art commercial research paper search endpoint with one customer using it. We have answers, reranking, monitoring — strong features that aren't getting the focused attention they deserve. You fix that. This isn't a PM role where you write tickets and manage a backlog. You're in the field. You talk to customers — a lot of them. You find the patterns, source the insights, and bring them back to the team in a way that changes what we prioritize. You're the bridge between what developers are actually trying to do and what we're building. Salary Range: $160,000–$230,000/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% Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) Job Type: Full-Time Experience: 3+ years in product research, customer discovery, technical PM, or founder-level product work — with demonstrated results Visa: US Citizenship/Visa required 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. What You'll Do Talk to customers constantly. This is the job. You're running 15-25 customer conversations a week — discovery calls, user interviews, onboarding sessions, churn conversations. You're not surveying people. You're having real conversations that uncover what they're building, where they're stuck, and what would make Firecrawl indispensable to their workflow. You develop a sixth sense for what customers say versus what they actually need. Find the insights that change priorities. You don't just report what customers said — you synthesize it. You spot the patterns across dozens of conversations and turn them into clear, actionable product recommendations. "Here’s the use case we’re missing, here’s how big it is, here’s what we’d need to build, here’s why it matters now." You bring receipts. Own customer discovery for new product surfaces. When the team is exploring a new direction — a new endpoint, a new pricing model, a new market segment — you’re the person who goes deep. You map the landscape, talk to the right people, and come back with a clear picture of whether it’s worth pursuing and how to win. You’ve done this at the 0-to-1 stage and you’ve done it at scale. You know the difference. Be the voice of the customer in every product conversation. You’re in the room when product and engineering decisions are being made. Not to slow things down — to make them sharper. You bring real user context that prevents the team from building technically impressive things nobody asked for. Close the feedback loop. When the team ships something based on your research, you go back to the customers who informed it. You validate. You measure. You learn. Discovery isn't a one-time phase — it's a continuous cycle that compounds the more you do it. Create content from customer conversations. The best product research doubles as marketing. Customer stories, use case write-ups, product positioning insights — you naturally produce content that helps the team sell and market, not just build. What We're Looking For Ex-founder energy. You’ve built something from scratch — ideally in dev tools or technical infrastructure. You know what it feels like to talk to your first 100 customers and figure out product-market fit by hand. That instinct doesn’t come from reading about it. YC background is a major plus. Genuinely technical. You don’t need to be writing production code, but you need to understand the product deeply enough to have credible conversations with developers. "Engineer" should be somewhere in your background, or you should be the kind of person who can vibe-code a working prototype and talk fluently about APIs, SDKs, and developer workflows. You can’t do discovery on a technical product if you don’t understand how it works. Exceptional communicator. You’re great on camera, great on calls, great in writing. You can talk to a senior ML engineer about their RAG pipeline and then turn that conversation into a crisp internal brief that changes what the team builds. You’re organized, you follow up, and people enjoy talking to you. Executor, not theorist. You don’t produce 30-page research reports that nobody reads. You produce clear recommendations with enough evidence to act on, and you move fast enough that your insights are still relevant when you share them. You bias toward action. Comfortable with ambiguity. There’s no playbook for this role at Firecrawl yet. You’re building the customer discovery function from scratch. If you need a manager to tell you who to talk to and what questions to ask, this isn’t the role. If you thrive when you get to figure it out — keep reading. Backgrounds that tend to do well: Ex-founders in the dev tools or API infrastructure space who understand 0-to-1 customer discovery. Technical PMs who’ve done real discovery work (not just roadmap management). Developer advocates who went deep on product strategy, not just content. People from the YC network who understand how early-stage companies find product-market fit. Engineers who realized they were better at talking to customers than writing code — and leaned into it. What We’re NOT Looking For Traditional product managers. If your experience is writing PRDs, grooming backlogs, and running sprint planning — that’s not this. We need someone who’s in the field, not in Jira. Consultants or freelancers. We need someone embedded in the team who builds deep context over time. If your background is mostly advisory work or short engagements, the learning curve will be too steep and the insights too shallow. People who aren’t technical enough. If you can’t hold your own in a conversation about web scraping, API design, LLMs, or developer infrastructure — you won’t be credible with our customers and you won’t be useful to our engineering team. You don’t need to be an engineer. But you need to be deeply comfortable in technical territory. Conference-circuit types. If your version of "customer discovery" is networking at events and collecting business cards, that isn’t what we mean. We mean sitting down with a developer, understanding their architecture, and figuring out where Firecrawl fits — or doesn’t. Slow movers. We’re a 26-person company competing in a market that’s moving at light speed. If you need weeks to synthesize findings or months to build conviction on a recommendation, the window will have closed. 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. Benefits & Perks Available to all employees Salary that makes sense — $160,000–$230,000/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, for moms and dads 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 Available to US-based full-time employees 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. We want to see evidence of real customer discovery work — case studies, product pivots you drove, insights that changed a company's direction. A portfolio of "I talked to X customers and we built Y as a result" goes a long way. Intro Chat (~20 min) — A quick conversation to get to know each other. We’ll talk about what you’ve been working on, your experience with customer discovery, and what drew you to Firecrawl. Time for your questions too. Deep Dive Chat (~45 min) — Walk us through a real example: a time you ran customer discovery that meaningfully changed what a product team built. We’ll go deep on your process — how you identified who to talk to, what you asked, how you synthesized, and how you got the team to act on it. Then we explore a live scenario at Firecrawl — how would you approach discovery for a product surface with low adoption? Founder Chat (~30 min) — Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work. Time for your questions too. Paid Work Trial (1–2 weeks) — Run a real mini-discovery sprint. Talk to actual Firecrawl customers, synthesize what you learn, and present a recommendation to the team. We evaluate on the quality of your insights, how you run conversations, and whether your recommendation would actually change what we build. Decision — We move fast after the trial. If you want to be the person who figures out what the fastest-growing web data infrastructure company should build next — by actually talking to the developers who use it — this is your shot. Apply now. #J-18808-Ljbffr