Research Engineer — Search/IR
Core
Building and operating full-stack search and information retrieval systems at massive scale to find, rank, index, and serve web content for AI agents and developers.
Role type
Senior IC Search/IR Engineer
Builds
Search indexes, ingestion pipelines, ranking models, and serving layers for Firecrawl's core product
Domain
Web search, Information Retrieval, Large-scale data infrastructure
Deliverable
production ML models | infrastructure
Required skills
Building search indexes at massive scale, ranking and relevance modeling, query understanding, full-stack pipeline ownership (ingestion to serving), incremental indexing and deduplication, experimental design and A/B testing
Preferred skills
Experience with BM25, learned ranking, and embedding-based retrieval, background in Elasticsearch/Algolia/Vespa, experience with RL-focused research
Technologies
Elasticsearch, Algolia, Vespa, BM25, embedding-based retrieval
Responsibilities
Design and maintain indexing infrastructure for billions of documents, own the full stack from ingestion to serving, build ranking and query understanding systems, solve freshness and deduplication problems, run experiments and ship results to production
Seniority
Senior, hands-on IC
