Forward Deployment Engineer (Developer Success)

Department: Engineering Team

Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) OR Remote-Global

Compensation: $150K – $250K • 0.01% – 0.1%

Employment Type: FullTime

Forward Deployment Engineer

You'll work directly with customers to deploy Firecrawl in real-world environments, unblock integrations, and turn customer needs into repeatable solutions and product improvements. This is a highly hands-on, customer-facing engineering role — ideal for someone who likes solving complex problems live and shipping pragmatic solutions fast.

Salary Range: $150,000–$250,000/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.)

Equity Range: Up to 0.10%

Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) OR Remote

Job Type: Full-Time (SF) OR Contract (Remote)

Experience: 3+ years or equivalent shipped systems

Visa: US Citizenship/Visa required for SF; N/A for Remote

About Firecrawl

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 80k+ 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 super-intelligence will use to gather data on the web. We ship fast and deep.

What You'll Do

• Work directly with customers to deploy, customize, and troubleshoot Firecrawl in production environments

• Own technical delivery for priority accounts, from first integration through ongoing optimization

• Debug complex real-world issues involving APIs, crawling, data pipelines, and infra constraints

• Build reusable solutions, templates, and playbooks based on customer needs

• Translate customer feedback into clear product and engineering insights

• Collaborate closely with core engineers to improve reliability, performance, and usability

• Help define best practices for how Firecrawl is implemented at scale

What We're Looking For

A strong engineer who likes being close to customers. You have solid fundamentals — APIs, systems, debugging — and you're comfortable explaining technical concepts clearly to people who aren't engineers. You'd rather hop on a call and unblock someone than file a ticket and wait.

Calm and effective in ambiguity. You don't need a runbook for every situation. You diagnose fast, communicate clearly, and make good decisions with incomplete information.

Biased toward action. You unblock first, optimize later. You ship pragmatic solutions over perfect abstractions and know when "good enough now" beats "ideal next quarter."

Comfortable in a small, high-trust team. You don't need layers of process. You work directly with founders and core engineers, own your domain, and move fast.

Backgrounds that often do well: Solutions engineers, SREs, devrel engineers, or customer-facing infra roles. Engineers at startups who wore multiple hats. Ex-founders who've debugged customer problems at 2am because the customer mattered.

What We're NOT Looking For

Backend engineers who don't want to talk to customers. This role is half engineering, half customer. If you'd rather stay in your IDE all day, this isn't it.

Process-dependent operators. If you need a detailed escalation path and a PM to prioritize your queue, you'll be frustrated here. You own the problem end-to-end.

Perfectionists who can't ship under pressure. Customers are waiting. The best solution you can ship today beats the ideal solution next week.

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 — $170,000–215,000/year (SF, U.S.-based), based on impact, not tenure

• Own a piece — Up to 0.20% 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 $1000/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

• 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

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

Interview Process

1. Application Review – Send us your stuff + a quick note on why this excites you (plus links to things you've built or deployed).

2. Technical + Customer Scenario Interview (~45 min) – Real-world problem solving: we'll walk through a customer deployment scenario and see how you debug, communicate, and prioritize live. We're looking for engineering depth and customer instincts — not trivia.

3. Founder Chat (~30 min) – Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work. Time for your questions too.

4. Paid Work Trial (1–2 weeks) – Test drive the real thing: work on a real customer deployment or integration with measurable impact.

5. Decision – We move fast after the trial.

If you've ever wanted to be the engineer customers remember by name at one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure startups, this is your shot.

👉 Apply now and let's set something on fire.