Hybrid Product Engineer – Search

at Firecrawl

• Job title: Product Engineer – Search
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: $180,000 - $290,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Location requirements: Hybrid, San Francisco, United States

About the role

• Own the developer-facing search experience at Firecrawl, translating research into impactful product decisions. Collaborating with engineering teams to improve search algorithms and developer experience.

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.
• Translate research into product decisions. You work closely with the Search/IR and RL Research Engineers.
• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 3+ years in applied RL, ML engineering, or model training — with production systems
• 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.
• 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.
• Brings production instincts. You've operated systems under real load. You know what breaks first, how to instrument what matters, and how to make good latency/quality tradeoffs. You're not just building features — you're building infrastructure developers depend on.

Benefits

• Salary that makes sense — $180,000–$290,000/year, based on impact, not tenure
• Own a piece — Up to 0.15% 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 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) — 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
• 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