Product Engineer - Parse
You'll build the endpoint developers reach for when they need to turn documents (PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, and more) into clean, layout-aware data an AI can actually use. Parse takes a local or non-public file and returns LLM-ready markdown or structured JSON in a single call, with tables, headings, footnotes, and reading order preserved. This is hands-on product engineering at the core of what Firecrawl does: shipping the document-parsing features that thousands of developers hit every day, owning them from idea to production, and obsessing over the details that make an API a joy to build on. You'll ship real product from day one, not tickets in a backlog.
Salary Range: $235,000–$260,000 USD/year (SF) / $217,000–$233,000 CAD/year (Toronto)
Equity Range: Competitive equity. Details shared during the process.
Location
San Francisco, CA (SF HQ) or Toronto, ON (Toronto Hub). Hybrid, onsite 3+ days a week.
Job Type: Full-Time
Experience: 3+ years building and shipping developer-facing product
Work Authorization: Open to candidates already authorized to work in the US or Canada. In the US, we also support H-1B transfers, F-1 OPT and STEM OPT, TN (Canada and Mexico), and E-3 (Australia). We’re not able to sponsor new H-1B visas for candidates outside the US. For Canada, we’ll consider work permit sponsorship case by case through our Toronto Hub.
What You'll Do
Build and ship developer-facing document-parsing features from idea to production
Own the reliability and quality of parsed output across PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, and more, including the messy scanned and mixed-format files that break traditional parsers
Turn hard, ambiguous problems (layout detection, table structure, reading order, OCR routing) into clean APIs developers love to use
Work directly with the engineering team on the roadmap and the tradeoffs behind it
Dogfood the product, read the GitHub issues, and let real developer pain drive what you build
What We're Looking For
You've built and shipped developer-facing product that people actually used
You care about developer experience like a designer cares about pixels: latency, output schema, docs, the whole feel of it
You're comfortable owning ambiguous problems and turning them into shipped features
You move fast and close the loop. You'd rather ship, measure, and iterate than perfect on paper
What We're NOT Looking For
Someone who needs a fully-specced ticket to start
A strong backend engineer who's indifferent to how the product feels to use
Someone who optimizes for process over shipping