Cloud DevOps Engineer

Job description

CLOUD DEVOPS ENGINEER You'll build the cloud infrastructure that turns the open web into data — the platform beneath Firecrawl's crawling, scraping, and search products. We need engineers who can make that foundation — Kubernetes, storage, networking, deployments — fast, reliable, and cheap at web scale. You'll own real infrastructure from day one — not tickets in a backlog. Salary Range: $240,000–$275,000/year Equity Range: Competitive equity — details shared during the process. Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid, on-site required) Job Type: Full-Time Experience: 5+ years in DevOps, Platform Engineering or Cloud Infrastructure Visa: Must be legally authorized to work in the United States. We're not able to sponsor visas right now, though that may change down the line. ABOUT FIRECRAWL Firecrawl is the easiest way to turn the web into data AI agents can use. One API call converts any URL into clean, LLM-ready markdown or structured data - the boring-hard problem everyone building with LLMs eventually hits, solved. We hit 8 figures in ARR in year one and more than doubled it in year two. We have 170k+ GitHub stars, and developers, agents, and category-defining AI companies build on us every day. Growth like this is rare, and we're just getting started. We're a small team punching far above our weight. Everyone here owns a real piece of the product and company, end to end, and runs it themselves - no hiding behind process or headcount. This is a place for people who want to work at the frontier: an AI company building the infrastructure other AI companies run on, not one bolting AI onto an existing product. We move fast, go deep, and are building the tools superintelligence will rely on to gather data from the web. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Design, build, and operate GCP and on-prem infrastructure behind Firecrawl's products - Run large stateful and high-throughput workloads on Kubernetes — search clusters, crawling fleets, queues, and databases — with zero-downtime upgrades - Own CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automations, and containerized deployments across the platform - Drive down infrastructure cost per request while traffic and data volume grow - Build the observability that keeps latency, throughput, and reliability predictable and define the SLIs, SLOs, and customer-facing SLAs we hold ourselves to. - Build and support our enterprise controls — SSO/SAML, RBAC, audit logging, tenant isolation, private networking, and the infrastructure behind SOC 2 and customer security reviews - Work directly with product and search engineers to productionize new services, retrieval, and ML workloads - Own the incident lifecycle with engineers — from on-call and triage process to postmortems and resolution. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - You've operated stateful distributed systems on Kubernetes at real scale — not just stateless services - You have deep experience with a major cloud (e.g. GCP, AWS, Azure), Docker, and Terraform; MLOps or ML-serving infrastructure experience (GPU workloads, model deployment pipelines) is a plus - You've run large-scale, data-heavy systems in production — search platforms, crawling or ingestion pipelines, or comparable. Hands-on experience operating Vespa https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa is a strong plus. - You care about latency, cost, and reliability in equal measure - Experience with security and compliance infrastructure (SSO/SAML, audit logging, network isolation, SOC 2) is a strong plus — especially for the Core Platform focus - You're comfortable owning ambiguous problems and turning them into shipped infrastructure WHAT WE'RE NOT LOOKING FOR - Someone who needs a fully-specced ticket to start - Someone who wants to specialize narrowly and hand off everything else - Someone who optimizes for process over shipping A NOTE ON PACE We operate at an absurd level of urgency because the window for what we're building won't stay open forever. If that excites you, keep reading. If it doesn't, no hard feelings — but this role probably isn't for you. BENEFITS & PERKS AVAILABLE TO ALL EMPLOYEES - Salary that makes sense — $240,000–$275,000/year, 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/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 INTERVIEW PROCESS Application Review — Send us your work and a quick note on why this excites you. Show us what you've built — clusters you've run, pipelines you've automated, incidents you've tamed. We care about what you've shipped, not where you went to school. Intro Chat (~25 min) — A quick conversation to get to know each other before we go deep. We'll talk about what you've been working on, what drew you to Firecrawl, and what you're looking for in your next role. Time for your questions too. Technical Chat (~45 min) — We'll dig into a real problem from our world examples include: running stateful clusters on Kubernetes, scaling a index fleet under growing traffic, or driving down cost per request — and talk through how you'd approach it. Come ready to think out loud; we care how you reason, not whether you memorized the answer. Founder Chat (~25 min) — Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work. Time for your questions too. Paid Work Trial (1-2 weeks) — Work with the team on a real, scoped piece of the product — paid at a contractor rate. It's the truest signal for both sides: you see what building at Firecrawl actually feels like, and we see how you ship. Remote-friendly, and we'll flex around your current commitments. Decision — We move fast after the trial. If you want to build the infrastructure that turns the whole web into data at a cost that shouldn't be possible, you should join us. 👉 Apply now.