[Hiring] Head of Research @Firecrawl

Role Description

You'll build and lead the research function at Firecrawl — the team responsible for making our core technology meaningfully better than anything else on the market. That means search, ranking, information retrieval, fine-tuning, and model training applied to the hardest problems in web data extraction. This isn't a research lab. Everything you build ships to production and runs at scale. You'll start by doing the work yourself, then hire a small team of people who are smarter than you.

What You'll Do

• Own the research roadmap:
  • Define what Firecrawl needs to build to stay technically ahead — across search, ranking, relevance, information retrieval, fine-tuning, and model training.
  • Decide where to invest research effort and what makes it into production.
• Ship research to production at scale:
  • Every project you lead ends with code running in production, serving real customers at real volume.
  • Work closely with the engineering team to ensure research output is production-grade — fast, reliable, and maintainable.
• Go deep on search and IR:
  • Build and improve the systems that power how Firecrawl finds, ranks, indexes, and retrieves web content.
  • Own freshness, deduplication, query understanding, and incremental indexing at scale.
• Fine-tune and train models:
  • Build and operate training pipelines that improve Firecrawl's extraction quality, content understanding, and data structuring.
• Build and lead a high-output research team:
  • Start hands-on, then hire 2–4 researchers who are deeply technical and ship fast.
  • Create an environment where they do their best work.
• Collaborate across engineering and product:
  • Work with the engineering team to prioritize research investments that directly improve the product.
  • Collaborate with the growth team to understand customer needs.

Qualifications

• Someone who has shipped research to production at scale.
• Deep knowledge across search, IR, fine-tuning, and model training.
• Experience building and leading small, high-output research teams.
• Can recruit people smarter than them.
• Production-minded.
• Backgrounds that tend to do well:
  • Applied research leads at search companies, data infrastructure startups, or AI labs with a production focus.
  • ML engineering managers who built search/ranking/IR systems at scale.
  • Technical founders who built and shipped ML-powered products.
  • Senior researchers who got frustrated with academia and wanted to ship.

Requirements

• 5+ years in applied research, ML engineering, or search/IR — with production systems at scale.
• US Citizenship/Visa required for SF; N/A for Remote.

Benefits

• Salary that makes sense — $200,000–$300,000/year, based on impact, not tenure.
• Own a piece — Up to 0.25% equity in what you're helping build.
• Generous PTO — 15 days mandatory, anything after 24 days, just ask (holidays excluded).
• 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.
• Supplemental options — Optional accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity, and voluntary life insurance.
• 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).
• Pet insurance — Because fur babies are family too.

Interview Process

• Application Review — Send us your stuff + a quick note on why this excites you.
• Technical Deep Dive (~75 min) — Go deep on your research and engineering work.
• Team & Leadership Interview (~45 min) — Discuss how you've built and led research teams.
• Founder Chat (~30 min) — Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work.
• Paid Work Trial (1–2 weeks) — Test drive the real thing: tackle a real research problem.
• Decision — We move fast after the trial.