Web Automation 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. If you like taking apart obfuscated JavaScript on a Tuesday and shipping the fix to production on Wednesday, this is for you.
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 browser automation, web infrastructure, or systems-level software
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
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
What We're Looking For
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
What We're NOT Looking For
Needs a spec: Someone who needs a fully specced ticket to start
Narrow lane: Someone who wants to specialize narrowly and hand off everything else
Process first: Someone who optimizes for process over shipping