You'll define how Firecrawl builds, deploys, and scales AI agents — both the ones we ship to customers and the ones that make our own team unreasonably fast. This is a hands-on, deeply technical role for someone who has already automated their own life to a degree most people find unhinged, and wants to do it at a company where that's considered a superpower. You'll report directly to the CEO.
Salary Range: $170,000–$250,000/year (Range shown is for U.S.-based employees in San Francisco, CA. You can explore how we calculate compensation here: https://www.firecrawl.dev/careers/compensation.)
Equity Range: Up to 0.20%
Location: San Francisco, CA (In-person)
Job Type: Full-Time
Experience: 4+ years building with AI/ML systems, or equivalent shipped work
Visa: US Citizenship/Visa required
About FirecrawlFirecrawl 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 DoOwn the agent layer of the product: Define the vision, architecture, and roadmap for how agents interact with Firecrawl — from autonomous web research agents to structured data extraction pipelines. You'll decide what we build, how we build it, and what ships.
Build agents that make the team 10x faster: Identify the highest-leverage internal workflows and automate them. Support, onboarding, content, ops — if a human is doing something repetitive, you'll build the agent that replaces the repetition.
Ship production-grade agent systems: This isn't a research role. You'll build agents that run in production, at scale, with real customers depending on them. You care about reliability, latency, and cost as much as capability.
Push the frontier of what's possible with LLMs: You'll be deep in prompt engineering, context window management, tool use, multi-agent orchestration, and whatever comes next. You stay ahead of the curve because you're building on it every day.
Work directly with the CEO: This role reports to Caleb. You'll have a direct line to company strategy and the autonomy to move fast on the things that matter most.
Recruit and eventually build a team: You'll start as a solo operator, but as the agent function grows, you'll hire and lead a small team of builders who share your obsession.
High taste, AI-pilled engineer who knows how models actually work. You don't just use AI — you understand it at the architecture level. You know why one prompting approach works and another doesn't. You can reason about context windows, token economics, and model behavior in production. You have opinions about which models to use for which tasks, and those opinions are well-informed.
Advanced vibe coder who builds better systems for the team. You write code fast, with good instincts, and you're always looking for ways to make the people around you faster. You've built internal tools, automations, and workflows that other people didn't know they needed until they couldn't live without them.
Automation obsessed — to an absurd degree. You've already automated large parts of your own life. Your friends and coworkers think it's a little much. You see manual processes the way most people see bugs — something that shouldn't exist and needs to be fixed immediately.
Someone who knows where the highest-leverage opportunities are. You don't just build cool things — you build the right things. You understand the business well enough to know which automation saves 10 minutes and which one unlocks a new revenue stream. You prioritize ruthlessly.
A builder who ships, not a researcher who publishes. You care about production, not papers. You'd rather have a working agent in prod than a perfect benchmark on a leaderboard. You move fast because you've internalized that speed is a feature.
Backgrounds that tend to do well: Engineers who've built agent systems or AI-powered products at startups. Technical founders who automated their own company's operations. ML engineers who got frustrated with research and wanted to ship. People who have side projects that are more automated than most people's companies.
What We're NOT Looking ForML researchers who don't ship product. If your best work lives in a Jupyter notebook and you've never deployed something a customer depends on, this isn't the role. We need production systems, not experiments.
Engineers who wait for a product spec. There is no PM for this role. You are the PM. If you need someone to define requirements before you can start building, you'll stall here.
People who are "interested in AI" but haven't built with it. We need someone who has already gone deep — not someone who wants to learn on the job. You should be able to talk about multi-agent orchestration, tool use patterns, and prompt optimization from experience, not from reading blog posts.
Anyone who treats automation as a nice-to-have. If your instinct is "let's do it manually first and automate later," you'll be philosophically misaligned with this role. We automate first. Manual is the fallback, not the default.
A Note On PaceWe 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 & PerksAvailable to all employeesSalary that makes sense — $170,000–$250,000/year, based on impact, not tenure
Own a piece — Up to 0.20% 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
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
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
Application Review — Send us your stuff + a quick note on why this excites you. Show us what you've built — agents, automations, internal tools, side projects. Shipped work > credentials.
Technical & Vision Interview (~60 min) — Go deep on your agent-building experience: architecture decisions, production challenges, and how you think about what to automate. Then we'll explore a live scenario — how you'd approach building an agent system for a real Firecrawl use case. We're looking for taste, speed of thinking, and depth of understanding — not rehearsed answers.
Founder Chat (~30 min) — Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work. This is with Caleb. Time for your questions too.
Paid Work Trial (1–2 weeks) — Test drive the real thing: build a real agent or automation that the team actually uses. We'll evaluate on taste, speed, and impact.
Decision — We move fast after the trial.
If you've been waiting for a company that values your obsession with making AI do everything — and you want to define the agent strategy at one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure startups — this is your shot.
👉 Apply now and let's build the future of agents. 🤖
Top Skills
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.
