Cloud DevOps Engineer

📋 Job Overview

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.

🏢 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.

🎯 The Role

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.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• 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

📌 Required Qualifications

• 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
• You've run large-scale, data-heavy systems in production — search platforms, crawling or ingestion pipelines, or comparable
• 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

⭐ Desirable Experience

• MLOps or ML-serving infrastructure experience (GPU workloads, model deployment pipelines) is a plus
• Hands-on experience operating Vespa is a strong plus

🎁 Benefits

Salary: $240,000–$275,000/year, based on impact, not tenure
Equity: Gain competitive equity in what you're helping build
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
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
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

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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.