Forward Deployed Engineer

Posted 13 Hours Ago
2 Locations
In-Office or Remote
150K-250K Annually
Mid level
Artificial Intelligence
Web data API for AI
The Role
The Forward Deployed Engineer is responsible for customer onboarding, running demos, building POCs, and driving account expansion while being the technical face of the company.
Summary Generated by Built In
Forward Deployed Engineer

You'll be embedded with our most important customers — not to write code in a corner, but to grow accounts by making Firecrawl indispensable. You'll run onboarding, lead demos, build POCs, drive expansion conversations, and be the technical face of Firecrawl that customers trust and want to keep working with. This is a customer-facing engineering role where your success is measured in revenue, not commits.

Salary Range: $150,000–$250,000/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: https://www.firecrawl.dev/careers/compensation.)

Equity Range: Up to 0.10%

Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) OR Remote (Americas, UTC-3 to UTC-10)

Job Type: Full-Time (SF) OR Contract (Remote)

Experience: 3+ years in a customer-facing technical role or equivalent

Visa: US Citizenship/Visa required for SF; N/A for Remote

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 90k+ 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 super-intelligence will use to gather data on the web. We ship fast and deep.

What You'll Do
  • Own customer onboarding end to end: Take new customers from signed contract to production deployment. Make the first experience so good they never consider an alternative.

  • Run demos and build POCs that close deals: Partner with the growth team to show technical buyers exactly how Firecrawl solves their problem — live, with their data, on their timeline.

  • Drive account expansion: Identify opportunities within existing accounts to grow usage, add new use cases, and expand contracts. You're not waiting for a CSM to flag upsell opportunities — you're the one closest to the customer.

  • Lead business reviews and customer calls: You're the technical face of Firecrawl. You run QBRs, handle escalations, and keep customers confident that we're the right long-term partner.

  • Build what customers need to buy: When a prospect needs a custom integration, a proof of concept, or a technical validation to get their team on board — you build it. Fast.

  • Feed product intelligence back to the team: You're in more customer conversations than anyone. Surface patterns — what's blocking adoption, what features would unlock expansion, where competitors are showing up — and make sure Product and Engineering hear it.

What We're Looking For

Someone who spends most of their time talking to customers, not coding alone. You're energized by customer calls, not drained by them. You'd rather be on a Zoom walking someone through an integration than heads-down in an IDE. The code you write exists to unblock a customer or close a deal — not for its own sake.

Technically deep enough to build what customers need to buy. You can build POCs, debug integrations, write against our API, and go deep on technical architecture conversations. You're not a sales rep who needs an engineer on every call — you are the engineer on the call.

Strong on-camera presence, confident on discovery calls and business reviews. You can run a demo without a script, handle live questions with poise, and hold a room (or a Zoom) with technical and non-technical stakeholders alike. People trust you because you're credible, clear, and genuinely helpful.

Growth-minded. You think about accounts in terms of expansion potential, not just support tickets. You see a customer using Firecrawl for one use case and immediately start thinking about the other three they should be using it for.

Fast to ramp on complex products. You'll develop a deep understanding of Firecrawl's API, infrastructure, and competitive landscape — not by reading docs, but by deploying it with real customers under real constraints.

Backgrounds that often do well: Solutions engineers or SEs at API/devtools companies. Customer-facing engineers at startups who owned the full lifecycle from demo to deployment. Technical account managers who actually built things. Ex-founders who sold and delivered their own product.

What We're NOT Looking For

Backend engineers who don't want to talk to customers. This role is 70% customer-facing, 30% building. If you'd rather stay in your IDE all day, this isn't it.

Traditional CSMs who can't go deep technically. Relationship management matters, but you earn trust through technical credibility — building POCs, debugging live, and knowing the product cold. If you need an engineer on every customer call, this isn't the right fit.

People who wait to be told which accounts to focus on. You own your book of business. You identify expansion opportunities, prioritize your own pipeline, and drive revenue without someone handing you a list every morning.

Slow movers. Customers are evaluating us alongside alternatives in real time. If you can't turn around a POC in days, not weeks, you'll lose deals here.

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 — $150,000–$250,000/year, based on impact, not tenure

  • Own a piece — Up to 0.10% 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
  1. Application Review – Send us your stuff + a quick note on why this excites you (plus links to things you've built or deployed for customers).

  2. Technical & Customer Scenario Interview (~45 min) – We'll walk through a real customer scenario: how you'd run an onboarding, handle a live technical question, and identify expansion opportunities in an account. We're looking for technical depth, customer instincts, and how you think about growing revenue — not rehearsed pitches.

  3. Founder Chat (~30 min) – Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work. Time for your questions too.

  4. Paid Work Trial (1–2 weeks) – Test drive the real thing: work on a real customer engagement with measurable impact.

  5. Decision – We move fast after the trial.

If you want to be the engineer customers ask for by name — and the reason accounts expand — at one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure startups, this is your shot.

👉 Apply now and let's set something on fire. 🔥

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The Company
HQ: San Francisco, CA
28 Employees
Year Founded: 2023

What We Do

Turn websites into LLM-ready data. Power your AI apps with clean data crawled from any website. It's also open source.

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