Research Engineer

About the role

You will build the evaluation infrastructure that determines the effectiveness of Firecrawl. This role requires designing metrics, constructing pipelines, and managing feedback loops to ensure our data conversion remains accurate across millions of diverse websites.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Define and quantify what constitutes high-quality output across various web formats and edge cases.
• Develop and maintain scalable pipelines and harnesses to measure data quality.
• Create and curate datasets to ensure evaluation processes remain trustworthy.
• Manage the feedback loop between output quality and product or model development.
• Translate complex quality questions into actionable insights for the engineering team.

Requirements

• 4+ years of professional experience in ML, research engineering, or data-heavy backend development.
• Demonstrated history of building evaluation systems rather than just running existing benchmarks.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguous environments where metrics must be created from scratch.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States. We do not provide visa sponsorship.
• A preference for shipping and iterating over theoretical perfection.

Skills & tools

• Evaluation system architecture
• Pipeline development
• Dataset curation
• Metric design
• Data-heavy backend engineering

Practical notes

Benefits include 15 days of mandatory PTO, 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, a $100/month wellness stipend, $1,000/year for professional development, and a 3-month paid sabbatical after 4 years. US-based employees receive full medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) access, and life/disability insurance. SF-based staff receive e-bike loans and office perks. The interview process includes an application review, an intro chat, a technical discussion, a founder chat, and a paid 1-2 week work trial.