Outbound Sales Engineer
•SerpApi· 3y
💻 Engineering⏰ Full-time📈 Mid Level💰 $80k-100k🌍 Worldwide
3y ago
Firecrawl·24 days ago
You'll own Firecrawl's flagship product — the scrape endpoint that turns any URL into clean, LLM-ready data with a single API call. It's the product 100k+ developers know us for, the one that put Firecrawl on the map, and the one every new AI app reaches for when it needs the web as input. Your job is to make it unbeatable: faster, more reliable, better formatted, and more delightful to integrate than anything else on the market.
This isn't a maintenance role. Scrape is the front door — and the front door has to be the best part of the house. At a 26-person company, the gap between "the scraper works" and "developers can't imagine using anything else" is exactly one person. You're that person.
Salary Range: $180,000 to $290,000/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: Up to 0.15%
Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote (Americas, UTC-3 to UTC-10)
Job Type: Full-Time
Experience: 3+ years shipping developer-facing products — ideally in scraping, crawling, browser automation, or data infrastructure
Visa: US Citizenship/Visa required for SF; N/A for Remote
Firecrawl is the easiest way to extract data from the web. Developers use us to reliably convert URLs into LLM-ready markdown or structured data with a single API call. In just a year, we've hit 8 figures in ARR and 120k+ GitHub stars by building the fastest way for developers to get LLM-ready data.
We're a small, fast-moving, technical team building essential infrastructure superintelligence will use to gather data on the web. We ship fast and deep.
Own the scrape product end-to-end. Scrape is the endpoint developers integrate first and the one they depend on most. You own how it feels — response format, latency, reliability, error messages, the markdown quality, structured extraction, every parameter, every edge case. If a developer has a bad time with /v1/scrape, that's on you. If they have a great one, that's on you too.
Make "just works" actually true. The web is messy. JavaScript-heavy SPAs, anti-bot walls, dynamic content, infinite scrolls, weird charsets, broken HTML. Developers don't want to know about any of it — they want clean markdown. Your job is to push the "just works" rate from great to unbeatable, one long-tail failure mode at a time.
Obsess over the output, not just the fetch. Pulling the HTML is table stakes. The product is the markdown — its structure, cleanliness, fidelity to the source, and how well it drops into an LLM prompt. You'll make calls about what gets stripped, what gets preserved, how tables and code blocks are handled, when to flatten vs. when to keep structure. These are product decisions disguised as engineering ones.
Ship structured extraction that developers trust. Schema-based extraction, JSON mode, prompt-based extraction — developers use these to skip the LLM call entirely. They have to be reliable enough to build on. You'll iterate on the extraction surface until developers stop writing their own post-processing.
Dogfood relentlessly. You build with the API before you ship changes to it. You feel the friction first. You read every GitHub issue, every Discord thread, every support ticket that touches scrape — not because someone asked you to, but because that's where the product signal lives.
Run fast product experiments. Form a hypothesis about what would make scrape better, instrument it, ship it, measure it, decide quickly. You're comfortable making calls with imperfect data because waiting for perfect data means shipping nothing — and the competition isn't waiting.
Raise the bar on developer experience. Firecrawl's users are technical. They notice when response formats drift, when error codes are unhelpful, when docs lag behind 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, markdown quality — 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.
Deep instincts for scraping and the messy web. This isn't abstract to you. You know why headless browsers fail, what anti-bot systems actually do, when to render JS and when not to, why some sites need stealth and others don't. You've felt the pain of a flaky scraper at 3am and you have opinions about how to build something that doesn't break.
Speaks both product and engineering fluently. You can read a rendering pipeline and understand its implications for the developer experience. You can write the API spec and implement it yourself. You don't need a PM to tell you what matters. You connect the dots from "this 99th percentile latency is creeping up" to "this is a product problem" 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 what makes data LLM-ready. You've built things on top of LLMs. You know what clean context looks like and what a noisy context window does to a model. You have intuitions about markdown structure, what to keep, what to drop, and how to make a scraped page feel native to an LLM prompt — 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/cost tradeoffs. You're not just building features — you're building infrastructure thousands of developers depend on every day.
Backgrounds that tend to do well: Engineers who've owned scraping, crawling, or data extraction products at developer-tools or data-infra companies. Full-stack engineers with a strong backend bias who've shipped APIs used by thousands of developers. Browser automation engineers (Playwright, Puppeteer, Chromium internals) who got frustrated by the distance between their work and the user experience. People who've built on top of Firecrawl, Apify, Bright Data, or rolled their own scraping stack — and cared enough about the product layer to go deeper than the fetch.
Great engineers who don't care about DX. If you build technically excellent systems but think API ergonomics, markdown quality, and documentation are someone else's problem, this isn't the role. The product experience is 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 browser internals and tune out when the conversation shifts to API design — or vice versa — this won't be a fit. This role requires you to hold both.
Slow shippers. Scrape is the most-used product we have, which means the feedback loop is fast and the cost of slow iteration is high. We need someone who can take a customer pain point to a shipped fix 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.
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.
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
Application Review — Send us your work and a quick note on why this excites you. Show us what you've shipped — scraping or data-extraction products, APIs, developer-facing tools. A GitHub link, a product you've built, or a write-up of something you're proud of goes a long way.
Intro Chat (~20 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.
Deep Dive Chat (~45 min) — Go deep on scraping products and APIs you've built: architecture decisions, DX tradeoffs, how you've handled the long tail of the messy web. We'll explore a live problem — how you'd improve a real piece of the scrape product end-to-end. We're looking for product instincts, technical depth, and the ability to hold both at once.
Founder Chat (~30 min) — Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work. Time for your questions too.
Paid Work Trial (1–2 weeks) — Tackle a real scrape product problem with production implications. We evaluate on shipping speed, product judgment, and how well you balance technical quality with developer experience.
Decision — We move fast after the trial.
If you want to own the product 100k+ developers already love — and make it the kind of thing they can't imagine working without — this is your shot.
👉 Apply now.