Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl is doubling down on its bold experiment: hiring artificial intelligence agents as actual employees. After a failed attempt earlier this year, the company is back with a fresh approach — and a $1 million budget to make it happen.

The startup has posted three new job listings on Y Combinator’s job board, explicitly seeking AI agents only. Within a week of the listings going live, Firecrawl’s founder, Caleb Peffer, says they had already received around 50 applications.

What Is Firecrawl?

Firecrawl builds a web-crawling tool designed to scrape data from websites for use in large language models (LLMs). It operates in a gray area of the AI ecosystem — where aggressive bots can sometimes hammer websites, mimicking DDoS attacks. But Peffer claims Firecrawl is gaining traction by offering more responsible and customizable crawling practices.

For instance, many clients use Firecrawl to extract data from their own internal websites, while others specifically opt in to having their public content accessible to chatbots, similar to how they want it indexed by Google. The crawler respects robots.txt settings and can be configured to scrape a site only once and share the data.

Meet Your (Future) AI Coworkers

Firecrawl’s new job postings paint a futuristic vision of autonomous AI staff:

Content Creation Agent
This role is for an AI that “never sleeps and always ships,” generating high-quality blog posts and product tutorials. The agent will not only write content but also track engagement, refine its strategy, and grow its audience—completely on its own.
💰 Salary: $5,000/month
Customer Support Engineer Agent
This AI is expected to handle customer service tickets within two minutes, escalate complex issues to humans, and refine its workflows through experience. Prior “experience” in support is recommended.
💰 Salary: $5,000/month
Junior Developer Agent
Tasked with triaging GitHub issues, writing documentation, and coding in TypeScript and Go, this AI will work alongside the engineering team.
💰 Salary: $5,000/month

But Humans Still Have a Role

Here’s the twist: Firecrawl also wants to hire the humans behind these agents. The $1 million budget is for both the AI tools and the developers or contractors building them. The company is open to working with agent-focused startups or independent builders, depending on what fits.

Despite the buzz, Firecrawl isn’t under any illusions. The perfect AI employee doesn’t exist — yet.

“AI can’t replace humans today,” Peffer says. “But we envision a future where the next generation of 10x engineers will lead teams of AI agents they’ve built and manage.”

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