About the role

We are looking for a Product Engineer (Search) with 3–12 years of experience to own Firecrawl's developer-facing search endpoint — closing the gap between retrieval and ranking research and what developers actually feel in the API. You'll be the single person who takes a ranking improvement from research and ships it as a live, polished developer experience in days, not sprints. No PM, no hand-holding — just you, the product, and a fast-moving team building infrastructure for the AI era.

What will you be doing?

Own the search API end-to-end — response format, latency, error handling, filtering, and docs — as the sole accountable person for how it feels to developers.
Translate retrieval and ranking research wins into shipped product changes developers notice (think: 200ms latency improvements, better recall/precision tradeoffs).
Dogfood the API relentlessly — read every GitHub issue and Discord thread touching search and fix friction before users have to ask.
Run fast product experiments: form a hypothesis, instrument it, ship it, measure it, and decide quickly with imperfect data.
Define what good looks like independently — no PM to scope tickets; you set the priorities and own the outcomes.

Key Requirements

Production search experience (retrieval, ranking, relevance) at a developer-facing company — this is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have.
Has shipped on top of Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Vespa, Algolia, vector databases, or a custom IR stack, and owned an externally consumed search API.
Can talk fluently about BM25 vs. semantic hybrid retrieval, re-ranking, and recall vs. precision tradeoffs — unprompted.
Founding engineer DNA: has shipped features end-to-end at a sub-200-person startup (Series A–C) without a PM, designer, or QA layer.
TypeScript/Node.js proficiency; comfortable with observability tooling (Datadog, Sentry, OpenTelemetry) and cloud infra in production.

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 our first year, we hit 8 figures in ARR and 125k+ 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 that superintelligence will use to gather data from the web. We ship fast and deep.

Why Firecrawl

Technical ownership. Own critical infrastructure end-to-end. No layers, no committees, no waiting for permission.
Real impact. Your work shapes the product directly. Ship something Monday, see it in customer hands by Friday.
High velocity. Rapid iteration, fast deployment, short feedback loops. We move at the pace of the problem.
Small team, big ambition. Work shoulder to shoulder with founders. Influence the decisions that define what Firecrawl becomes.

What it Means to Join Firecrawl

High leverage. Your work directly amplifies company growth. Every system you build, every process you ship, every customer you close compounds.
Autonomy. Own your domain. We care about outcomes, not hours.
Remote-first with an SF hub. Most of the team is remote, working across 10+ time zones. Our SF office is open for anyone who wants to work in person, and we bring the whole team together regularly for offsites.
Growth opportunity. Early equity and a role that scales with the company. Senior people get senior surface area.
Creative freedom. Experiment with new channels, formats, and automations. If it works, we run with it.

Product Engineer - Search

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