Head of Research

Firecrawl Inc.

Job Overview

Location

San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) OR Remote (Americas, UTC-3 to UTC-10)

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• As Head of Research at Firecrawl Inc., you will build and lead the research function responsible for advancing the company’s core technology in web data extraction, search, ranking, information retrieval, fine-tuning, and model training — ensuring every innovation ships to production and runs at scale to maintain Firecrawl’s technical edge in a competitive market.
• You will begin by executing hands-on research and engineering work, then hire and lead a small team of 2–4 exceptional researchers who are smarter than you, fostering a high-output culture where impact, not publications, drives success.
• Day to day, you will own the research roadmap by defining strategic priorities across search, ranking, relevance, information retrieval, fine-tuning, and model training, deciding where to invest effort and what transitions to production.
• You will ship research to production at scale, ensuring every project ends with code serving real customers at real volume, collaborating closely with engineering to guarantee output is fast, reliable, and maintainable.
• You will go deep on search and information retrieval systems, improving how Firecrawl finds, ranks, indexes, and retrieves web content — owning freshness, deduplication, query understanding, and incremental indexing at scale.
• You will build and operate model training pipelines that enhance extraction quality, content understanding, and data structuring, turning raw data into production-impacting models.
• You will build and lead a high-output research team, starting hands-on then hiring 2–4 top-tier researchers, creating an environment where technical excellence and shipping speed thrive.
• You will collaborate across engineering and product teams to align research investments with product improvements and customer needs, ensuring research directly drives business impact.
• You will work in a small, fast-moving, technical team at Firecrawl — a company that has achieved 8 figures in ARR and 90k+ GitHub stars by delivering the fastest way for developers to get LLM-ready web data — where urgency and ownership are paramount.
• You will learn and achieve technical leadership in applied ML systems at scale, gain experience building and leading elite research teams in a startup environment, and directly shape Firecrawl’s technical ceiling through hiring, innovation, and production-grade research that powers real-world customer value.

🎯 Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in applied research, ML engineering, or search/IR with a proven track record of shipping research to production at scale — not just experimentation, but deployed systems serving real customers.
• Deep, hands-on expertise across search, information retrieval, ranking, fine-tuning, and model training, including building search indexes, training ranking models, fine-tuning LLMs, and operating the infrastructure that supports them in production environments.
• Experience building and leading small, high-output research teams (ideal background: Series A–D startups, 10–50 person range), with demonstrated ability to hire exceptional talent, set direction without micromanaging, and create a culture where researchers want to stay and ship fast.
• A strong network of top researchers and proven ability to recruit people smarter than yourself, energized by talent rather than threatened by it, with a mission-driven approach to hiring.
• Production-minded mindset: you prioritize latency, cost, reliability, and maintainability alongside model quality, with experience debugging ML systems at 3am and making hard tradeoffs between accuracy and speed in real-world conditions.
• Backgrounds that align well include applied research leads at search companies, data infrastructure startups, or AI labs with production focus; ML engineering managers who built search/ranking/IR systems at scale; technical founders who shipped ML-powered products; or senior researchers transitioning from academia to impact-driven work.

🏖️ Benefits

• Competitive salary range of $200,000–$300,000/year, based on impact rather than tenure, with adjustments for cost of living outside the U.S.
• Equity opportunity of up to 0.25% in Firecrawl, allowing you to own a meaningful piece of the company you help build.
• Generous time-off policy: 15 days mandatory PTO, with additional days available upon request (holidays excluded), plus 12 weeks fully paid parental leave for moms and dads.
• Wellness stipend of $100/month for gym, therapy, massages, or other personal well-being expenses.
• Annual learning and development budget of up to $1,000 for professional growth opportunities.
• Team offsites and a 3-month paid sabbatical after 4 years of service.
• For U.S.-based employees: full coverage medical, dental, and vision (100% for employees, 50% for dependents), employer-paid life and disability insurance, 401(k) plan, FSA and commuter benefits, pet insurance, and Doctegrity telehealth access.
• For San Francisco-based employees: office perks including snacks, drinks, team lunches, ping pong, and a loaner e-bike for city transportation.

Skills & Technologies

GitHub

Remote

$200k-300k

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Firecrawl Inc.

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About Firecrawl Inc.

Firecrawl Inc. provides an API that converts entire websites into clean markdown or structured data. Designed for AI applications, the service crawls all accessible subpages, renders dynamic content, and returns LLM-ready output without requiring sitemaps. It includes built-in scraping, search, and extraction capabilities for building knowledge bases, fine-tuning datasets, or powering chatbots. The company targets developers and data teams who need reliable web content ingestion at scale, offering cloud-hosted endpoints and self-hosted options under a usage-based pricing model.

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