Cloud DevOps Engineer

Salary Range: $240,000–$275,000/year. Competitive equity details shared during the process. Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid, on-site required). Full-time role requiring 5+ years of experience in DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Cloud Infrastructure. Must be legally authorized to work in the United States; visa sponsorship not available at this time.

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. With 170k+ GitHub stars, developers, agents, and category-defining AI companies build on us every day. We're a small team punching far above our weight, where everyone owns a real piece of the product and company end-to-end. This is a place for people who want to work at the frontier: an AI company building the infrastructure other AI companies run on.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate GCP and on-prem infrastructure behind Firecrawl's products.
• Run large stateful and high-throughput workloads on Kubernetes—search clusters, crawling fleets, queues, and databases—with zero-downtime upgrades.
• Own CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automations, and containerized deployments across the platform.
• Drive down infrastructure cost per request while traffic and data volume grow.
• Build the observability that keeps latency, throughput, and reliability predictable and define the SLIs, SLOs, and customer-facing SLAs.
• Build and support enterprise controls—SSO/SAML, RBAC, audit logging, tenant isolation, private networking, and the infrastructure behind SOC 2 and customer security reviews.
• Work directly with product and search engineers to productionize new services, retrieval, and ML workloads.
• Own the incident lifecycle with engineers—from on-call and triage process to postmortems and resolution.

What We're Looking For

• Experience operating stateful distributed systems on Kubernetes at real scale—not just stateless services.
• Deep experience with a major cloud (e.g., GCP, AWS, Azure), Docker, and Terraform; MLOps or ML-serving infrastructure experience (GPU workloads, model deployment pipelines) is a plus.
• Experience running large-scale, data-heavy systems in production—search platforms, crawling or ingestion pipelines, or comparable. Hands-on experience operating Vespa is a strong plus.
• Equal focus on latency, cost, and reliability.
• Experience with security and compliance infrastructure (SSO/SAML, audit logging, network isolation, SOC 2) is a strong plus—especially for the Core Platform focus.
• Comfort owning ambiguous problems and turning them into shipped infrastructure.

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: $240,000–$275,000/year, based on impact, not tenure.
• Equity: Competitive equity in what you're helping build.
• 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

• Healthcare: Full coverage, no red tape—Medical, dental, and vision (100% for employees, 50% for spouse/kids).
• Life & Disability insurance: Employer-paid short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance.
• Supplemental options: Optional accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity, and voluntary life insurance.
• Telehealth: Doctegrity telehealth—talk to a doctor from your couch.
• 401(k) plan: Retirement savings with employer matching.
• Pre-tax benefits: Access to FSAs and commuter benefits (US-only).
• Pet insurance: Coverage for fur babies.

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.