Owns developer-facing search API at Firecrawl, shipping research improvements (retrieval, ranking) into production-ready features with obsessive focus on DX, latency, and usability. Requires 3+ years in applied RL/ML engineering or model training with production systems.
Backgrounds that tend to do well: Engineers owning search/discovery at dev-tools companies, full-stack with backend bias shipping APIs, search infrastructure teams, built on Elasticsearch/Vespa/vector databases.
Compensation: $180,000–$290,000/year (U.S.-based in San Francisco, CA; adjusted for other locations). Up to 0.15% equity.
Benefits: Generous PTO, parental leave, wellness stipend, learning stipend, team offsites, sabbatical (US: full medical/dental/vision, life/disability insurance).
Build systems for extracting, connecting, retrieving, and reasoning over knowledge from the web to enable AI agents to answer questions with precision. Requires experience with complex distributed backend systems and petabyte-scale data pipelines.
Build and own the xAI API and high-throughput inference infrastructure serving models globally with low latency and high availability. Requires expert Rust or C++ skills and experience with scalable distributed systems.
Builds backend tools for enterprise control plane including access control, change management, and data warehouse optimization. Requires expertise in distributed systems, asynchronous workflows, and product-minded engineering for scalable, reliable architectures.
Builds and scales high-throughput streaming infrastructure to ingest and process billions of customer behavioral events in real-time at sub-second latency. Owns end-to-end projects, solves customer scaling issues, and influences roadmap in a remote-first startup.