Search Engineer
- Market p25–p75
- $161k–$239k
- Firecrawl p25–p75
- $241k–$248kn=14
- Opened · 30d
- +0
- Closed · 30d
- −0
- Opened · 7d
- +2,1036% of open
- All software engineering
- 75,149open
Search Engineer
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: $235,000–$260,000 USD/year (SF) / $217,000–$233,000 CAD/year (Toronto)
Equity Range: Competitive equity. Details shared during the process.
Location: San Francisco, CA (SF HQ) or Toronto, ON (Toronto Hub). Hybrid, onsite 3+ days a week.
Job Type: Full-Time
Experience: 3+ years building production backend or infra systems
Work Authorization: Open to candidates already authorized to work in the US or Canada. In the US, we also support H-1B transfers, F-1 OPT and STEM OPT, TN (Canada and Mexico), and E-3 (Australia). We’re not able to sponsor new H-1B visas for candidates outside the US. For Canada, we’ll consider work permit sponsorship case by case through our Toronto Hub.
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. It's the boring-hard problem everyone building with LLMs eventually hits, solved.
In September 2026, we raised a $75M Series B led by Smash Capital, and we're spending it building the largest repository of knowledge in the world. We hit 8 figures in ARR in year one and more than doubled it in year two. We have 192k+ GitHub stars, putting us in the top 40 repositories of all time, 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. That library is called Alexandria, and it starts now.
Our Values
Bias to action: We move fast, ship hard, and don’t wait to be told.
Realistic about AI: We’re clear-eyed about what AI can and can’t do, and we keep pushing to use it where it actually works.
All in: The next few years matter a lot, and we’re all in for them.
Human connection: As intelligence gets cheaper, relationships with customers, partners, and each other matter more.
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: $235,000–$260,000 USD/year (SF) / $217,000–$233,000 CAD/year (Toronto), 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