Head of Research

Firecrawl•San Francisco, UT

1d•$200,000 - $300,000•Remote

About The Position

You'll build and lead the research function at Firecrawl — the team responsible for making our core technology meaningfully better than anything else on the market. That means search, ranking, information retrieval, fine-tuning, and model training applied to the hardest problems in web data extraction. This isn't a research lab. Everything you build ships to production and runs at scale. You'll start by doing the work yourself, then hire a small team of people who are smarter than you. About Firecrawl Firecrawl is the easiest way to extract data from the web. Developers use us to reliably convert URLs into LLM-ready markdown or structured data with a single API call. In just a year, we've hit 8 figures in ARR and 90k+ GitHub stars by building the fastest way for developers to get LLM-ready data. We're a small, fast-moving, technical team building essential infrastructure super-intelligence will use to gather data on the web. We ship fast and deep.

Requirements

Someone who has shipped research to production at scale. You've taken research from idea to experiment to deployed system — not once, but repeatedly. You know the difference between a promising result in a notebook and a system that works at production volume with real-world data. You optimize for impact, not publications.
Deep knowledge across search, IR, fine-tuning, and model training. You don't just know one corner of ML. You've built search indexes, trained ranking models, fine-tuned LLMs, and operated the infrastructure that supports all of it. You can go deep on any of these and you know how they connect.
Experience building and leading small, high-output research teams. You've built research teams at startups — ideally Series A through Series D, in the 10-to-50-person range. You know how to hire well, set direction without micromanaging, and create a culture where great researchers want to stay. Small team, big output is your default mode.
Can recruit people smarter than them. This is non-negotiable. You have a network of strong researchers and you know how to sell a mission. You're not threatened by talent — you're energized by it. The team you build will define Firecrawl's technical ceiling.
Production-minded. You care about latency, cost, reliability, and maintainability as much as model quality. You've debugged production ML systems at 3am and you've made hard tradeoffs between accuracy and speed. You know that research that doesn't ship is research that doesn't matter.
Backgrounds that tend to do well: Applied research leads at search companies, data infrastructure startups, or AI labs with a production focus. ML engineering managers who built search/ranking/IR systems at scale. Technical founders who built and shipped ML-powered products. Senior researchers who got frustrated with academia and wanted to ship.

Responsibilities

Own the research roadmap: Define what Firecrawl needs to build to stay technically ahead — across search, ranking, relevance, information retrieval, fine-tuning, and model training. You'll decide where we invest research effort and what makes it into production.
Ship research to production at scale: Every project you lead ends with code running in prod, serving real customers at real volume. You'll work closely with the engineering team to make sure research output is production-grade — fast, reliable, and maintainable.
Go deep on search and IR: Build and improve the systems that power how Firecrawl finds, ranks, indexes, and retrieves web content. This is core to the product and core to the moat. You'll own freshness, dedup, query understanding, and incremental indexing at a scale that matters.
Fine-tune and train models: Build and operate training pipelines that improve Firecrawl's extraction quality, content understanding, and data structuring. You know how to get from raw data to a model that moves a metric in production.
Build and lead a high-output research team: You'll start hands-on, then hire 2–4 researchers who are deeply technical and ship fast. You know how to find and attract people who are smarter than you — and how to create an environment where they do their best work.
Collaborate across engineering and product: Research doesn't happen in a vacuum. You'll work with Nick and the engineering team to prioritize research investments that directly improve the product, and with the growth team to understand what customers need.

Benefits

Available to all employees
Salary that makes sense — $200,000–$300,000/year, based on impact, not tenure
Own a piece — Up to 0.25% 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 moms and dads
Wellness stipend — $100/month for the gym, therapy, massages, or whatever keeps you human
Learning & Development — Expense up to $1,000/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
Available to US-based full-time employees
Full coverage, no red tape — Medical, dental, and vision (100% for employees, 50% for spouse/kids) — no weird loopholes, just care that works
Life & Disability insurance — Employer-paid short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance — coverage for life's curveballs
Supplemental options — Optional accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity, and voluntary life insurance for extra peace of mind
Doctegrity telehealth — Talk to a doctor from your couch
401(k) plan — Retirement might be a ways off, but future-you will thank you
Pre-tax benefits — Access to FSAs and commuter benefits (US-only) to help your wallet out a bit
Pet insurance — Because fur babies are family too
Available to SF-based employees
SF HQ perks — Snacks, drinks, team lunches, intense ping pong, and peak startup energy
E-Bike transportation — A loaner electric bike to get you around the city, on us