Forward Deployed Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 16, 2026. First seen by Alion on Aug 3, 2026. Firecrawl scores B on the Alion truth index.
Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
You'll be the engineer customers trust to make Firecrawl work in the real world. When a high-value account hits a hard extraction problem, a messy integration, or a "can it even do this?" question, you're the one who shows up, digs into their stack, and ships the thing that unblocks them. This is a customer-facing engineering role measured in adoption and expansion, not tickets closed. You build, you deploy, you own the outcome.
Salary Range: $209,000-$265,000 USD/year OTE
Equity Range: Competitive equity. Details shared during the process.
Location: San Francisco, CA (SF HQ). On-site, five days a week.
Job Type: Full-Time
Experience: 3+ years in a customer-facing technical role or equivalent
Work Authorization: Open to candidates already authorized to work 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.
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 187k+ 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.
What You'll Do
Land inside a customer's environment, understand what they're building, and make Firecrawl work for their actual use case
Get hands-on with the product against real customer data, build integrations and POCs that turn "not sure this works for us" into production
Run technical discovery: diagnose where a customer's extraction or pipeline breaks, and know whether it's usage, a bug, or a real product gap
Partner with the Deployment team to turn technical wins into adoption and expansion, and hit team targets
Be the trusted technical voice for accounts, and bring what you learn in the field back to product and engineering
Know when to solve it yourself and when to pull in engineering
What We're Looking For
You've done forward-deployed, solutions, or customer-facing engineering, ideally at a developer, API, or AI-infra product
You're technical enough to earn a developer's respect: you can read code, use an API, and build a real POC or integration yourself
You've owned the full lifecycle for a customer, from demo to POC to production, and can point to the technical work that made it land
You check before you build: you can tell user error from a bug from a real product gap, and you don't turn every ask into a custom feature
You can translate between deep technical detail and business value without losing either audience
You move fast and close the loop. You'd rather ship a working POC against real data than perfect a doc
Backgrounds that often do well: solutions engineers or SEs at API/devtools companies. Customer-facing engineers at startups who owned the full lifecycle from demo to deployment. Technical account managers who actually built things. Ex-founders who sold and delivered their own product.
What We're NOT Looking For
A pure backend engineer who doesn't want to be in front of customers
A quota-carrying seller who can't build
Someone who needs a fully-built playbook before they can run
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: $209,000-$265,000 USD/year OTE, 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
Parental leave: 12 weeks fully paid, for all parents
Wellness stipend: $100 USD/month for the gym, therapy, massages, or whatever keeps you human
Learning & Development: Expense up to $1,000 USD/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 partner and kids). No weird loopholes, just care that works
Life & Disability insurance: Employer-paid basic life and AD&D, short-term disability, and long-term disability. Coverage for life's curveballs
Virtual care and a health guide: Teladoc for the couch doctor visit, plus Rightway to answer coverage questions and fight billing errors for you
Mental health: Talkspace, therapy and psychiatry on your schedule
Fertility and family building: Carrot, covering you and your partner
EAP: Free confidential counseling, legal and financial consults, and online will prep through Guardian
401(k) plan: Retirement might be a ways off, but future-you will thank you
Pre-tax benefits: HSA, FSA, and commuter benefits to help your wallet out a bit
Supplemental options: Extra life and AD&D, accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity, plus pet, legal, and identity protection through MetLife
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
Application Review: Send us your work and a quick note on why this excites you. Tell us about a customer or partner you got to production and the technical problems you solved to get there. We care about what you've done, not where you went to school.
Intro Chat (~25 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.
Technical & Customer Scenario Interview (~55 min): We'll walk through a real customer scenario: how you'd run an onboarding, handle a live technical question, and identify expansion opportunities in an account. We're looking for technical depth, customer instincts, and how you think about growing revenue, not rehearsed pitches.
Founder Chat (~25 min): Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work. Time for your questions too.
Paid Work Trial (~40 Hours): Take on a real, scoped customer scenario with the team, paid at a contractor rate. Build a POC, scope an integration, or run a technical discovery. It's the truest signal for both sides. You see what the role actually feels like, and we see how you operate. We'll flex around your current commitments.
Decision: We move fast after the trial.
If you want to be the engineer customers ask for by name, and the reason accounts expand, at one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure startups, this is your shot.
Apply now.