Research Engineer — Search/IR

About this role

Build and operate search and information retrieval systems at scale for Firecrawl, a web data extraction platform. You'll own the full stack from document ingestion to ranking and serving, directly impacting retrieval quality that differentiates the product in the AI agent ecosystem.

What you'll do

• Design and maintain indexing infrastructure handling billions of documents at scale
• Own complete search pipeline from ingestion, processing, and indexing through ranking and serving
• Build ranking models, relevance scoring, and query understanding systems
• Implement freshness, deduplication, and incremental indexing strategies
• Design and run production experiments to improve search quality metrics
• Collaborate with research and engineering teams on product improvements

What they're looking for

• Large-scale search/information retrieval systems
• Ranking algorithms (BM25, learned ranking, embedding-based retrieval)
• Indexing infrastructure and distributed systems
• Query understanding and relevance optimization
• Full-stack pipeline design and operation
• Data deduplication and incremental processing
• Experimentation and metrics-driven development
• Systems optimization for latency and storage

Benefits

• $180,000–$290,000 annual salary (U.S. San Francisco; adjusted internationally)
• Up to 0.15% equity
• Hybrid work in San Francisco or remote (Americas, UTC-3 to UTC-10)
• Full-time position
• Small, fast-moving technical team