Design Engineer

You'll own the look, feel, and experience of Firecrawl across our entire platform — from the core product UI to docs, playgrounds, and marketing pages. You take ideas from rough sketches to production-ready pages, and you ship them fast. If you care about motion, precision, and performance, you'll thrive here.

Salary Range: $160,000–$240,000/year (Range shown is for U.S.-based employees in San Francisco, CA. Compensation outside the U.S. is adjusted fairly based on your country's cost of living. You can explore how we calculate this here: https://www.firecrawl.dev/careers/compensation.)

Equity Range: Up to 0.15%

Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)

Job Type: Full-Time

Experience: 3+ years

Visa: US Citizenship/Visa required

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 100k+ 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.

What You'll Do

• Build beautiful, fast UIs using Next.js, Tailwind, and Framer Motion

• Create and optimize product pages and interactive playgrounds

• Maintain and scale our internal design system across all surfaces

• Own UX and polish across marketing, docs, and app interfaces

• Collaborate directly with founders to ship high-impact features

• Lead proof-of-concept work for new ideas and experiences

What We're Looking For

A builder with a sharp eye and obsessive attention to motion, interaction, and polish.

You go from concept to finished product independently. You don't wait for a spec to be perfect — you ship, iterate, and make things better every day. You've worked in fast environments before and you like it that way.

Strong with Next.js, Tailwind, and Framer Motion. These are our core stack. You don't need to be an expert in all three on day one, but you should be dangerous in at least two and excited to go deep on the third.

Obsessed with developer experience. Our users are developers. You understand that great design in a dev tools context means clarity, speed, and zero friction — not flashy gimmicks.

You ship live projects with real users. Portfolio pieces are fine. But we want to see things people actually use — not just Dribbble shots that never saw production.

Backgrounds that often do well: Design engineers at developer tools companies, frontend engineers with strong design instincts, designers who code and ship their own work, or indie builders who've launched products end-to-end.

What We're NOT Looking For

Pure designers who don't code. This role lives in the codebase. If you need an engineer to implement your designs, this isn't the right fit.

People who optimize for pixel-perfect mockups over shipped product. We value speed and iteration. If you spend a week in Figma before touching code, you'll be frustrated here.

Someone who needs a lot of structure or process. We don't have a design team, a sprint cadence, or a formal review pipeline. You'll get a problem, some context, and the trust to go solve it.

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 — $150,000–$200,000/year (SF, U.S.-based), based on impact, not tenure

Own a piece — Up to 0.1% 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

Interview Process

Application Review — Send us your stuff and a quick note on why this excites you. Show us what you've shipped — live products, design systems, interactive pages, anything with real users. A portfolio link, a GitHub repo, or a deployed project goes a long way.

Intro Chat (~20 min) — A quick conversation to get to know you.

Deep Dive Chat (~45 min) — Show us your best work and tackle a small design engineering challenge live. We're looking for taste, speed, and how you think through tradeoffs — not trivia.

Founder Chat (~30 min) — Culture, pace, ownership, and how you like to work. Time for your questions too.

Paid Work Trial (1–2 weeks) — Test drive the real thing: build something real with us — a page, a component, a playground — with measurable output.

Decision — We move fast after the trial.

If you want to own the design and experience layer of one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure startups — and you ship code, not just mockups — this is your shot.

👉 Apply now.