Search Engineer

You'll keep Firecrawl connected to the open web. Every product we ship depends on reliably accessing pages at web scale, and the modern web actively resists automation with detection systems, challenge flows, and fingerprinting that evolve weekly. This role is equal parts research and engineering: understand how those systems work at the deepest level, then turn that understanding into infrastructure that keeps our scraping fast, reliable, and resilient.

Responsibilities:

• Reverse engineer detection: Research how modern websites detect and challenge automated traffic, and take apart those mechanisms and challenge flows
• Find the signals: Identify the browser, device, network, and behavioral signals that separate automated access from human traffic
• Replicate and harden: Reproduce those signals synthetically in authorized test environments to validate and harden our approaches
• Turn research into production: Build the automation, diagnostic, and monitoring tools that keep scrape reliability high as the web shifts
• Own scrape success rate: Measure it, explain regressions, and ship the fixes
• Ship fleet-wide: Work with platform engineers to roll improvements out across the crawling fleet at scale

Requirements:

• Languages: Strong JavaScript/TypeScript and/or Python, and comfortable picking up whatever a problem demands
• Browser internals: Real understanding of rendering, JS engines, headless automation (CDP, Playwright, Puppeteer), and where automated browsers differ from real ones
• Network fundamentals: Solid grasp of HTTP/TLS, proxies, and browser and device fingerprinting
• Reverse-engineering instincts: You can read minified, obfuscated code and figure out what it's actually checking
• Research with a shipping habit: You go deep on how something works, then land the fix in production, not just a writeup

Nice to have:

• Deobfuscating JavaScript and VM-based obfuscation, network-level fingerprinting (TLS/HTTP2 signatures, JA3/JA4), running large browser or proxy fleets in production, or prior work at a scraping, web data, security research, or automation company

Benefits & Perks:

• Salary that makes sense: $235,000–$260,000 USD/year (SF) / $217,000–$233,000 CAD/year (Toronto), 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