Product Engineer - Parse

Mendable; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 235,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary that makes sense - $235,000-$?

Own a piece - Competitive equity

Generous PTO - 15 days +

Parental leave - 12 weeks

Wellness stipend - $100/month

Learning & Development - up to $1,000/

Team offsites

Sabbatical - 3 paid months

Medical, dental, vision coverage

US-based SFHQ perks

E-Bike transportation

Job summary

Firecrawl is hiring a hands-on engineer to own developer-facing document-parsing features from idea to production. You will ensure reliability across PDFs, Word, spreadsheets, and mixed formats, and ship clean APIs that developers actually love to use.

You’ll collaborate with the core engineering team on the roadmap, balance tradeoffs, and relentlessly optimize latency, schema design, and documentation. This is a high-impact role at a fast-moving startup that rewards shipping great product.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building and shipping developer-facing products.
• Strong focus on latency, output schema, and developer docs.
• Ability to own ambiguous problems and ship reliable features.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship developer-facing document-parsing features from idea to production.
• Own reliability and quality of parsed output across PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, and more.
• Turn layout detection, table structure, reading order into clean APIs developers love.
• Collaborate with the engineering team on roadmap and tradeoffs.
• Dogfood the product and translate developer pain into built solutions.

Skills

Developer-facing product

API design

Reliability

Shipping features

Tools

GitHub

Job description

You'll build the endpoint developers reach for when they need to turn documents (PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, and more) into clean, layout-aware data an AI can actually use. Parse takes a local or non-public file and returns LLM-ready markdown or structured JSON in a single call, with tables, headings, footnotes, and reading order preserved. This is hands-on product engineering at the core of what Firecrawl does: shipping the document-parsing features that thousands of developers hit every day, owning them from idea to production, and obsessing over the details that make an API a joy to build on. You'll ship real product from day one, not tickets in a backlog.

Salary Range: $235,000-$260,000/year

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

Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite)

Job Type: Full-Time

Experience: 3+ years building and shipping developer-facing product

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

• Build and ship developer-facing document-parsing features from idea to production
• Own the reliability and quality of parsed output across PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, and more, including the messy scanned and mixed-format files that break traditional parsers
• Turn hard, ambiguous problems (layout detection, table structure, reading order, OCR routing) into clean APIs developers love to use
• Work directly with the engineering team on the roadmap and the tradeoffs behind it
• Dogfood the product, read the GitHub issues, and let real developer pain drive what you build

What We're Looking For

• You've built and shipped developer-facing product that people actually used
• You care about developer experience like a designer cares about pixels: latency, output schema, docs, the whole feel of it
• You're comfortable owning ambiguous problems and turning them into shipped features
• 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 needs a fully-specced ticket to start
• A strong backend engineer who's indifferent to how the product feels to use
• Someone who optimizes for process over shipping

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 - $235,000-$260,000/year, 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 (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. Show us what you've shipped — products, features, APIs developers actually used. We care about what you've built, not where you went to school.

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.

Technical Chat (~45 min) — We'll dig into a real problem from our world — pulling reliable structured data out of a hostile PDF, or designing a parsing API developers love — and talk through how you'd approach it. Come ready to think out loud; we care how you reason, not whether you memorized the answer.

Founder Chat (~25 min) — Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work. Time for your questions too.

Paid Work Trial (1-2 weeks) — Work with the team on a real, scoped piece of the product — 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.

Decision — We move fast after the trial.

If you want to build the products that turn the chaos of documents and the web into something developers and agents can actually use, you should join us.