General Counsel
General Counsel
You'll run legal at Firecrawl, all of it. Strategy, risk posture, policy, the team, and the outside firms. Every question about what we can crawl, license, build, sign, and ship comes to you first, and the founders will treat your read as the read.
Firecrawl sits on some of the least settled legal ground in technology. The rules for web data access, AI training data, copyright, and who owns machine-generated output are being written right now: in courtrooms, in regulators' offices, and in the deals companies like ours sign every week. Our General Counsel doesn't wait for that to settle. You'll set Firecrawl's positions, defend them to customers, counterparties, and regulators, and, where it counts, help shape where the law lands.
You'll report to our CEO, lead and finish building the legal team (commercial and product counsel, a technical compliance program lead shared with our CTO, and legal operations), own outside counsel and the legal budget, and sit next to the founders on financings, board matters, and every decision with a legal edge, which at Firecrawl is most of them.
Salary Range: $310,000-$392,000 USD/year
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: 12+ years of legal experience, including time running or helping run legal in-house at a venture-backed technology company
Work Authorization: Must be authorized to work in the United States. We're not able to sponsor US visas right now, though that may change down the line.
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.
We hit 8 figures in ARR in year one and more than doubled it in year two. We have 180k+ GitHub stars, putting us in the top 50 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, working out of SF HQ and our new Toronto Hub. 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.
What You'll Do
Set Firecrawl's legal strategy and risk posture, starting with the questions that define the company: what we crawl and how, how we treat robots.txt and publisher opt-outs, what data provenance we stand behind, and where the lines are on AI training data, agents acting on the web for users, and machine-generated output
Own the company's position on web data access and be ready to defend it anywhere: in customer diligence, across a negotiating table, in front of a regulator, or in court if it comes to that. Run disputes, demand letters, and pre-litigation strategy yourself, bringing in outside counsel when the matter warrants it
Run corporate and board legal: financings, governance, the cap table and equity plans, board materials and minutes, and the corporate hygiene that holds up under diligence. You'll act as corporate secretary
Set the commercial legal posture from the top: risk allocation, indemnity and data-provenance positions, fallback ladders, and approval thresholds. Your counsel run the deals. You decide what they can give
Lead privacy, security, and compliance strategy alongside our CTO: GDPR, CCPA, the EU AI Act and the state AI laws behind it, SOC 2 and the enterprise diligence machine, sanctions and export questions, and whether laws written for data brokers reach a company like ours
Steward our open source posture: license strategy, contributor terms, trademark and brand protection, and the line between the project and the product
Advise People and Operations on employment and contractor matters across every country we hire in: EOR and PEO structures, IP assignment that holds across borders, classification, and immigration as we grow into it
Build and lead the legal team: hire, level, and develop the lawyers and legal ops people under you, run outside counsel to a budget, and make legal a function engineers and salespeople route through by choice
Represent Firecrawl in the policy conversation on web data access and AI: industry coalitions, amicus opportunities, and direct engagement with regulators and legislators. Where the law is unsettled, we intend to have a hand in settling it
Cover everything else with a legal edge: insurance, government inquiries, communications review when something goes sideways, and the questions nobody has assigned yet. At our size the GC's scope is the whole company
What We're Looking For
You've run legal somewhere, or been the person who effectively did. GC, deputy GC, or the senior lawyer the founders actually called, at a venture-backed technology company. A first GC seat is fine if you've operated at that altitude and made calls you had to live with
You cover the full field. Corporate, financings, and governance on one side; commercial, product, data, and IP on the other. Deep in at least one, credible in all of them, and honest about where you'll lean on outside counsel
You have a real point of view on web data, AI, and copyright, and you can defend it. You've read the cases, you've watched the licensing market form, and you're not waiting for settled law to take a position
You give business advice, not legal cover. The founders will ask what you would do and expect an answer: a recommendation and a risk read they can act on, not a memo listing every possible exposure. If your default answer is no, this will be frustrating for both of us
You've been in the room when it went wrong. A demand letter, a regulator's inquiry, a deal that died on indemnity, a board meeting with bad news. Calm and clear under that is not a nice-to-have here
You lead lawyers and non-lawyers. You've built or run a small legal team, held outside counsel to a budget, and earned the trust of engineers and salespeople by being fast, clear, and unpretentious
You're an AI super user. Non-negotiable. You already use AI heavily in your own practice, you'll set the standard for the legal team, and you want to push it further than anyone has taken it in this profession
Membership in good standing in at least one US state bar, and either California bar membership or eligibility to register as in-house counsel in California. Preferred: a J.D. from a T14 law school or comparable academic credentials, training at an Am Law 100 firm or a comparably sophisticated firm, and in-house years at a company that scaled fast. Exposure to data licensing, privacy, IP, open source, or data-access disputes is a strong plus
What We're NOT Looking For
A GC who runs legal as the department of no and measures success by risk avoided rather than by what the company shipped and signed
A law firm partner or senior associate who has never had to live inside a company with the consequences of their own advice
A pure corporate and securities lawyer, or a pure commercial lawyer. This seat needs both
Anyone who thinks "can we crawl this" is an obvious yes or an obvious no. Both are wrong, and the whole job lives in the gap
Someone who needs a full team, a CLM platform, and settled law before making a call
Someone who wants the title and the strategy but plans to send the hard, novel questions to outside counsel. Those questions are the job
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.
If you've spent a career advising companies and want to run legal for one at the moment its questions are the most interesting in the profession, this is the one. Very few lawyers get to set the legal posture for infrastructure the AI industry runs on. It won't be boring.
Benefits & Perks
Available to all employees
Salary that makes sense: $310,000-$392,000 USD/year. 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 resume and a short note on why this excites you. Tell us about a legal call you made that the business pushed back on, how you landed it, and whether time proved you right.
Intro Chat (~25 min): A quick conversation to get to know each other before we go deep. What you've been running, what drew you to Firecrawl, and what you want next. Time for your questions too.
Case Chat (~45 min): We'll work through a real problem from our world: a publisher's demand letter, a frontier lab's provenance requirements, a regulator's question nobody has answered yet. How you'd set the company's position, what you'd tell the founders, and what you'd refuse to sign. Come ready to think out loud. We care how you reason, not whether you know the market term.
Strategy Exercise (Paid, ~2 hours): One scoped, realistic scenario. You write the memo you'd hand the founders: your recommendation, the exposure, and what you'd do in your first 30 days. Keep it short. We'll read every word.
Founder Chats (~30 min each): Time with each of our founders on culture, pace, ownership, and how you'd work together. Time for your questions too.
References: We'll want to talk to a founder or CEO you've advised and to someone who sat across the table from you.
Decision: We move fast after references.
If you want to run legal for the infrastructure layer of AI, and set the positions before anyone has written the playbook, you should join us.
Apply now.