Product Researcher

About this role

PRODUCT RESEARCHER

You'll be the person who figures out what Firecrawl should build next — and why. Right now, our engineers are shipping great infrastructure, and our support and sales teams are handling inbound well. But the bigger product bets — the ones that turn a good tool into a dominant platform — are stalling because nobody has the bandwidth to do real customer discovery. We have a state-of-the-art commercial research paper search endpoint with one customer using it. We have answers, reranking, monitoring — strong features that aren't getting the focused attention they deserve. You fix that.

This isn't a PM role where you write tickets and manage a backlog. You're in the field. You talk to customers — a lot of them. You find the patterns, source the insights, and bring them back to the team in a way that changes what we prioritize. You're the bridge between what developers are actually trying to do and what we're building.

Salary Range: $160,000 to $230,000/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.)

Equity Range: Up to 0.15%

Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote (Americas, UTC-3 to UTC-10)

Job Type: Full-Time

Experience: 3+ years in product research, customer discovery, technical PM, or founder-level product work — with demonstrated results

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 120k+ 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 superintelligence will use to gather data on the web. We ship fast and deep.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Talk to customers constantly. This is the job. You're running 15-25 customer conversations a week — discovery calls, user interviews, onboarding sessions, churn conversations. You're not surveying people. You're having real conversations that uncover what they're building, where they're stuck, and what would make Firecrawl indispensable to their workflow. You develop a sixth sense for what customers say versus what they actually need.

Find the insights that change priorities. You don't just report what customers said — you synthesize it. You spot the patterns across dozens of conversations and turn them into clear, actionable product recommendations. "Here's the use case we're missing, here's how big it is, here's what we'd need to build, here's why it matters now." You bring receipts.

Own customer discovery for new product surfaces. When the team is exploring a new direction — a new endpoint, a new pricing model, a new market segment — you're the person who goes deep. You map the landscape, talk to the right people, and come back with a clear picture of whether it's worth pursuing and how to win. You've done this at the 0-to-1 stage and you've done it at scale. You know the difference.

Be the voice of the customer in every product conversation. You're in the room when product and engineering decisions are being made. Not to slow things down — to make them sharper. You bring real user context that prevents the team from building technically impressive things nobody asked for.

Close the feedback loop. When the team ships something based on your research, you go back to the customers who informed it. You validate. You measure. You learn. Discovery isn't a one-time phase — it's a continuous cycle that compounds the more you do it.

Create content from customer conversations. The best product research doubles as marketing. Customer stories, use case write-ups, product positioning insights — you naturally produce content that helps the team sell and market, not just build.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Ex-founder energy. You've built something from scratch — ideally in dev tools or technical infrastructure. You know what it feels like to talk to your first 100 customers and figure out product-market fit by hand. That instinct doesn't come from reading about it. YC background is a major plus.

Genuinely technical. You don't need to be writing production code, but you need to understand the product deeply enough to have credible conversations with developers. "Engineer" should be somewhere in your background, or you should be the kind of person who can vibe-code a working prototype and talk fluently about APIs, SDKs, and developer workflows. You can't do discovery on a technical product if you don't understand how it works.

Exceptional communicator. You're great on camera, great on calls, great in writing. You can talk to a senior ML engineer about their RAG pipeline and then turn that conversation into a crisp internal brief that changes what the team builds. You're organized, you follow up, and people enjoy talking to you.

Executor, not theorist. You don't produce 30-page research reports that nobody reads. You produce clear recommendations with enough evidence to act on, and you move fast enough that your insights are still relevant when you share them. You bias toward action.

Comfortable with ambiguity. There's no playbook for this role at Firecrawl yet. You're building the customer discovery function from scratch. If you need a manager to tell you who to talk to and what questions to ask, this isn't the role. If you thrive when you get to figure it out — keep reading.

Backgrounds that tend to do well: Ex-founders in the dev tools or API infrastructure space who understand 0-to-1 customer discovery. Technical PMs who've done real discovery work (not just roadmap management). Developer advocates who went deep on product strategy, not just content. People from the YC network who understand how early-stage companies find product-market fit. Engineers who realized they were better at talking to cu

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