Search Engineer

Mendable; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Generous PTO

Parental leave

Wellness stipend

Learning & Development

Team offsites

Sabbatical

Comprehensive health benefits

401(k)

Job summary

Firecrawl is building the infrastructure that turns the open web into data AI agents can use. You will own core search infrastructure from day one, developing crawling, indexing, and retrieval systems to scale with demand.

As a senior engineer, you will drive latency reductions, cost per query, and ranking quality for LLM-driven retrieval, while shipping reliable production services and collaborating with the Head of Search on roadmap priorities.

Qualifications

• Built and operated backend or distributed systems at real scale.
• Focus on latency, cost, and correctness in equal measure.
• Owns ambiguous problems and ships working systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build crawling, indexing, and retrieval systems behind Firecrawl Search.
• Push down latency and cost per query as search volume grows.
• Improve ranking quality and freshness for LLM-driven retrieval.
• Own services end to end — design, ship, monitor, and iterate in production.
• Collaborate with Head of Search and team on the roadmap.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Latency optimization

Cost optimization

Production infrastructure

Job description

You'll build the systems that let anyone turn the open web into a search index. Firecrawl's search product is one of our fastest-growing surfaces, and we need engineers who can make crawling, ranking, and retrieval fast, reliable, and cheap at scale. You'll own real infrastructure from day one — not tickets in a backlog.
Salary Range: $190,000-$260,000/year (Range shown is for U.S.-based employees in San Francisco, CA. Compensation outside the U.S. is adjusted fairly based on your country's cost of living.)
Equity Range: Competitive equity — details shared during the process.
Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid, on-site required)
Job Type: Full-Time
Experience: 3+ years building production backend or infra systems
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 150k+ 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 and build the crawling, indexing, and retrieval systems behind Firecrawl Search
• Push down latency and cost per query while search volume grows
• Improve ranking quality and freshness for LLM-driven retrieval
• Own services end to end — design, ship, monitor, and iterate in production
• Work directly with the Head of Search and the rest of the search team on the roadmap
  

What We\'re Looking For

• You\'ve built and operated backend or distributed systems at real scale
• You care about latency, cost, and correctness in equal measure
• You're comfortable owning ambiguous problems and turning them into shipped systems
• 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
• Someone who wants to specialize narrowly and hand off everything else
• 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 — $190,000–$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 built — search systems, indexing pipelines, ranking improvements. We care about what you\'ve shipped, 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 — crawling at scale, ranking quality, or driving down cost per query — 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 search 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 search infrastructure that serves the whole web at a cost that shouldn\'t be possible, you should join us.

Apply now.