Product Engineer — Search

About the role

You'll own the developer-facing search experience at Firecrawl — taking the retrieval and ranking improvements coming out of research and shipping them as a product developers can't stop using. This isn't a pure research role and it isn't a pure backend role. You sit at the intersection: you understand how the systems work deeply enough to improve them, and you care about how they feel to use obsessively enough to make them great.

Responsibilities

• Ship search improvements that developers notice. Take retrieval and ranking improvements from research and turn them into product changes that make developers say "this just works."
• Own the search API end-to-end. You're responsible for how Firecrawl's search endpoint feels to integrate, use, and build on. That means response format, latency, error handling, pagination, filtering — every surface a developer touches.
• Dogfood relentlessly. You build things with the API before you ship them. You feel the friction before your users do. You read every GitHub issue, every Discord thread, every support ticket that touches search — not because someone asked you to, but because that's where the product signal lives.
• Translate research into product decisions. You work closely with the Search/IR and RL Research Engineers. You understand their work well enough to make good product calls about what to prioritize, what to expose to users, and what to keep under the hood. You ask good questions. You push back when something technically elegant would make the API worse.
• Run fast product experiments. You form a hypothesis about what would make search better for developers, instrument it, ship it, measure it, and decide quickly. You're comfortable making calls with imperfect data because waiting for perfect data means shipping nothing.
• Raise the bar on developer experience. Firecrawl's users are technical. They have high standards. They notice when response formats are inconsistent, when error messages are unhelpful, when documentation doesn't match behavior. You notice too — and you fix it before they have to ask.
• Obsessive about developer experience. You think about DX the way a designer thinks about pixels. Latency, response structure, error messages, API ergonomics — these things matter to you on a visceral level. You've built APIs that developers loved and you know the difference between an API that works and one that delights.
• Speaks both product and engineering fluently. You can read a ranking algorithm and understand its implications for the search experience. You can write the API spec and implement it yourself. You don't need a PM to tell you what matters or an ML engineer to explain why a retrieval change is significant. You connect those dots on your own.
• Hands-on builder who ships. You write code. You own features from design to deployment. You're comfortable with ambiguity and you don't need a perfectly scoped ticket to make progress. You ship something, learn from it, and iterate.
• Has a feel for search as a product. You've thought seriously about what makes search good — not just fast or accurate, but genuinely useful. You understand the difference between recall and precision and why developers care about both. You have intuitions about query understanding, result ranking, and when semantic search beats keyword search — and you've built products that put those intuitions to work.
• Bridges the gap between research and shipped product. You bridge the gap between research and shipped product by taking the improvements coming out of research and turning them into product changes that make developers say "this just works."

Requirements

• 3+ years in applied RL, ML engineering, or model training — with production systems

Qualifications

• Great engineers who don't care about DX. If you build technically excellent systems but think API ergonomics and documentation are someone else's problem, this isn't the role. The product experience is part of the job — not an afterthought.
• People who need a PM. There's no product manager between you and the work. You define what good looks like, you decide what to prioritize, and you own the outcome. If that's uncomfortable, you'll struggle here.
• Specialists who only work on one layer. If you're only interested in backend systems and tune out when the conversation shifts to how something is exposed to developers — or vice versa — this won't be a fit. This role requires you to hold both.
• Slow shippers. The research team will produce improvements faster than a slow product cycle can absorb them. We need someone who can take something from "this ranking model is better" to "this is live in the API with docs and an example" in days, not sprints.
• People who don't use the product. If you're not the kind of engineer who builds side projects with APIs like ours, reads the docs critically, and notices when something feels off — you'll miss the signal that makes this role work.

Benefits

• 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)
• 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

Pay

$180,000–$290,000/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/)

Schedule

Hybrid or Remote (Americas, UTC-3 to UTC-10) / Remote (US)