---
title: 'Research Engineer at Firecrawl'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-firecrawl-san-francisco-4dhwy2dz84ay'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Research Engineer at Firecrawl

- **Company:** Firecrawl
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $250k–$290k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-12
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/firecrawl/25092c0e-9a32-4191-af79-050738213704/application

**Skills:** Machine Learning Engineering, Applied AI, Data Quality, LLM Evaluation, Python, Data Pipeline Design, Benchmark Design, CI/CD, Scraping, Automation, Security Engineering, RLHF Pipelines, Data Infrastructure

> Build evaluation systems to measure the quality of data extraction from the web, designing metrics, pipelines, and datasets. Own LLM-as-judge pipelines and feedback loops to improve models, working closely with product teams to ensure evaluations reflect real-world web data challenges.

## Job description

## RESEARCH ENGINEER

You'll build the evaluation systems that tell us whether Firecrawl actually works. That sounds simple. It isn't. Our core promise, convert any URL into clean, structured, LLM-ready data reliably, is hard to measure rigorously across millions of different websites, formats, and edge cases. As the systems we're measuring get more complex, the question "did that work?" gets harder, not easier.

This isn't an eval role where you inherit a framework and run benchmarks. You'll design the metrics, build the pipelines, generate the datasets, and own the feedback loop from output quality back to model and product decisions. If you care about what "good" actually means and have the engineering depth to measure it, this is the role.

Salary Range: $250,000–$290,000/year

Equity Range: Competitive equity — details shared during the process.

Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite)

Job Type: Full-Time

Experience: 4+ years in ML, research engineering, or data-heavy backend, with real evaluation work

Visa: Must be legally authorized to work in the United States. We're not able to sponsor visas right now, though that may change down the line.

## ABOUT FIRECRAWL

Firecrawl is the easiest way to turn the web into data AI agents can use. One API call converts any URL into clean, LLM-ready markdown or structured data - the boring-hard problem everyone building with LLMs eventually hits, solved.

We hit 8 figures in ARR in year one and more than doubled it in year two. We have 175k+ GitHub stars, and developers, agents, and category-defining AI companies build on us every day. Growth like this is rare, and we're just getting started.

We're a small team punching far above our weight. Everyone here owns a real piece of the product and company, end to end, and runs it themselves - no hiding behind process or headcount.

This is a place for people who want to work at the frontier: an AI company building the infrastructure other AI companies run on, not one bolting AI onto an existing product. We move fast, go deep, and are building the tools superintelligence will rely on to gather data from the web.

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Design the metrics that define what "good output" actually means across millions of sites, formats, and edge cases
- Build the pipelines and harnesses that measure quality rigorously and at scale
- Generate and curate the datasets that make evaluation trustworthy
- Own the feedback loop from output quality back to model and product decisions
- Turn "did that work?" into an answer the whole team can act on

## WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- You have the engineering depth to build real evaluation systems, not just run existing ones
- You care deeply about what "good" means and how to measure it rigorously
- You're comfortable owning ambiguous problems where the metric itself has to be invented
- 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 only wants to run benchmarks someone else designed
- A pure researcher who won't build the systems, or a pure engineer who won't think about methodology
- Someone who needs a fully-specced ticket to start

## 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 — $250,000-$290,000/year (U.S.-based), 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

## 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 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

1. Application Review — Send us your work and a quick note on why this excites you. Show us what you've built — eval systems, metrics you designed, datasets you created, quality problems you measured. We care about what you've shipped, not where you went to school.
2. Intro Chat (~25 min) — A quick conversation to get to know each other before we go deep. We'll talk about what you've been working on, what drew you to Firecrawl, and what you're looking for in your next role. Time for your questions too.
3. Technical Chat (~45 min) — We'll dig into a real problem from our world — how you'd measure whether messy web output is actually "good," and build the system to prove it. Come ready to think out loud; we care how you reason, not whether you memorized the answer.
4. Founder Chat (~25 min) — Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work. Time for your questions too.
5. Paid Work Trial (1-2 weeks) — Work with the team on a real, scoped evaluation problem — 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.
6. Decision — We move fast after the trial.

If you care about what "good" actually means and have the engineering depth to measure it, you should join us.

👉 Apply now.

## About Firecrawl

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Firecrawl provides an API that allows AI systems to search, scrape, and interact with web content at scale, converting it into clean, structured data for LLMs and AI-native software.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Caleb Peffer (CEO), Eric Ciarla (Chief Growth Officer), Nicolas Silberstein Camara (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Infrastructure for AI / Web Data Extraction
- **Target customers**: B2B, developers, AI engineers, data scientists, and companies building LLM-based applications and agents
- **Mission statement**: "To make web data work for AI — cleanly, scalably, and in real time." The company describes itself as "building the eyes for AGI."

## Products & Services
- **[Firecrawl API](https://www.firecrawl.dev/)**: A unified API that turns the live internet into clean Markdown and structured data for LLMs, agents, and AI-native software. Core capabilities include:
  - **Search**: Searches the web and returns full page content (not just links) for real-time context and RAG pipelines.
  - **Scrape**: Converts any URL into clean markdown, structured JSON, screenshots, or semantic text.
  - **Interact**: Cloud sandboxes for agents that can click buttons, fill forms, and navigate dynamic content using natural language or code.
  - **Crawl**: Crawls websites at scale with blazing speed (P95 latency of 3.4s) and industry-leading reliability (covers 96% of the web, including JS-heavy pages).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$16.2M** (Seed from Y Combinator, Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator, Nexus Venture Partners (Lead, Series A), Abhinav Asthana (CEO of Postman), Tobias Lutke (CEO of Shopify), Matt McClure (Founder of Mux)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - One of the fastest growing open source projects in the world with **125K+ GitHub stars** (one of the top 100 repos on GitHub)
  - **1.25M+ weekly downloads**
  - **150K+ developers signed up**
  - **5B+ requests served**
  - **125K+ companies using Firecrawl**
  - The company states it plans to hit **$100M in ARR with fewer than 50 people**

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unified platform**: Unlike duct-taping together proxies, scrapers, orchestrators, and post-processing logic, Firecrawl offers a single API for search, scrape, crawl, and interact — purpose-built for AI.
- **Speed and reliability**: P95 latency of 3.4s and 96% web coverage, including JavaScript-heavy pages, making it production-ready for real-time agents.
- **Open source dominance**: Being one of the top 100 repos on GitHub creates massive community adoption, trust, and a built-in distribution channel.
- **Founder-market fit**: The team previously built Mendable and SideGuide, giving them deep experience in the AI and developer tooling space.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the platform to handle increasing demand, expanding the "Interact" capability for agentic workflows, and maintaining leadership in the web-to-LLM data pipeline space.
- **Direction for growth**: Building the foundational infrastructure for AI-native software where "intelligence isn't an add-on, it's part of the core." The company is hiring aggressively across engineering, research, and growth roles to achieve its $100M ARR target with a lean team.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Founder-led environment — 80% of the team are former founders, 80% have a developer background. The company values "extreme speed" and ships rapidly.
- **Remote/Hybrid policy**: Hybrid in San Francisco, CA OR Remote in the Americas (UTC-3 to UTC-10). Full-time positions with visa sponsorship available.
- **Team size**: Lean team of approximately 12 people currently, with a philosophy of staying small and efficient.
- **Notable perks**: Opportunity to work on a high-impact, open-source project that is foundational to the AI ecosystem. The company is backed by top-tier investors and has massive traction, offering significant growth potential for early employees.
- **Engineering culture**: Emphasis on building the "eyes for AGI" — working at the cutting edge of AI infrastructure, with roles spanning product engineering, research engineering (Search/IR, Reinforcement Learning, Evals), and growth engineering.

## Sources
1. [firecrawl.dev/about](https://www.firecrawl.dev/about)
2. [firecrawl.dev](https://www.firecrawl.dev/)
3. [firecrawl.dev/careers](https://www.firecrawl.dev/careers)
4. [trymatchbox.com](https://www.trymatchbox.com/startups/70a1509f-8242-4a51-83ee-516a9ce596d5)
5. [github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl](https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl)

## Other roles at Firecrawl

- [Customer Solution Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-solution-engineer-firecrawl-san-francisco-6w7str36xcvn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Commercial Counsel](https://feeny.ai/job/commercial-counsel-firecrawl-san-francisco-7we64hsr0a73) — San Francisco, CA
- [Legal Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/legal-operations-manager-firecrawl-san-francisco-65hykameaepv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Commercial & Product Counsel](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-commercial-product-counsel-firecrawl-san-francisco-f3w982zmgpa5) — San Francisco, CA
- [Open Source Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/open-source-engineer-firecrawl-san-francisco-tr94p135ysae) — San Francisco, CA
- [Agent Experience Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/agent-experience-engineer-firecrawl-san-francisco-vzk5eax5yxrg) — San Francisco, CA
- [Technical Compliance Program Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-compliance-program-manager-firecrawl-san-francisco-9faen8gwk3d5) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Engineer - Agent](https://feeny.ai/job/product-engineer-agent-firecrawl-san-francisco-03zwxgmqxk9g) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Engineer - Parse](https://feeny.ai/job/product-engineer-parse-firecrawl-san-francisco-0b0d0adwtsw2) — San Francisco, CA
- [Enterprise Solutions Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-solutions-engineer-firecrawl-san-francisco-d3dqtfszf995) — San Francisco, CA