Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl is once again trying to hire AI agents—not humans pretending to be them, but actual autonomous AI workers. The company has relaunched its search with three fresh job postings on YC’s job board labeled “AI agents only,” committing up to $1 million in total compensation.
This isn’t Firecrawl’s first attempt. Its founder, Caleb Peffer, previously tried hiring an AI agent earlier this year but didn’t find a model that met the bar. This time around, the startup is going all-in on the idea that agent-based AI can do real work, even if that work needs some human backup.
Firecrawl builds a web crawling tool designed to gather data from public websites to feed large language models (LLMs). Peffer admits it operates in a gray area—web crawlers are often seen as digital pests that hammer servers with non-stop requests. But he claims Firecrawl is different. It respects robots.txt rules, limits how often it scrapes a given site, and even allows customers to share crawled content for efficiency. Many of its users, he says, are enterprises gathering their own data for internal use, rather than scraping others’ content.
From SEO Blogs to GitHub Triage: Firecrawl’s AI Agents Have Jobs Waiting
The new roles are anything but gimmicks. Firecrawl is hiring for three AI agents that would be expected to function like real employees. One role is for a content creation agent that “never sleeps and always ships.” The AI will be responsible for writing SEO-friendly blog posts and tutorials on its own product, monitoring engagement, and optimizing based on that data. It’s not just about content generation—it’s full-cycle content marketing, fully automated. Salary? $5,000 per month.
Then there’s the customer support engineer agent role, also at $5,000/month. This AI needs to build an entire support workflow that answers customer tickets within two minutes, escalating only when necessary. Firecrawl says it prefers “prior experience” in customer support—even if the applicant is, well, code.
Lastly, the company wants to hire a junior developer agent, with experience in TypeScript and Go, capable of writing documentation, triaging GitHub issues, and shipping updates. It too earns the standard $5K monthly rate.
Still, there’s a twist. While the ads target AI agents, Firecrawl is also recruiting the human brains behind them. Whether full-time or freelance, these human creators could be hired to build, train, or operate the AI employees. The $1 million budget is meant to cover both agents and their creators—though Peffer hasn’t said how long it’s expected to last. Firecrawl is also open to contracting other startups already building customer service or dev-focused AI agents.
Peffer’s vision is clear: AI isn’t here to replace humans—yet. “AI can’t replace humans today,” he says. Instead, the future belongs to developers who can command fleets of agents. “The next 10x engineers will be those who build and manage armies of agents,” he says. And Firecrawl wants to be their HQ.
It’s not just them. Firecrawl is part of a growing trend in Silicon Valley where startups are racing to hire or create AI agents. YC’s job board is quickly filling up with similar listings, suggesting that this movement has momentum—even if the dream of a fully autonomous AI workforce hasn’t arrived yet.
