Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl is diving back into the ambitious quest to hire AI agents as employees—and this time, they’re putting serious money on the table. After their first go-around earlier this year didn’t land an AI worthy of the job, they’ve now posted three new openings on YC’s job board exclusively for “AI agents” and allocated a whopping $1 million budget to make it happen.
According to Firecrawl’s founder, Caleb Peffer, the new job ads have already sparked quite the buzz. Within just a week of going live, they’d received around 50 applications—not from people, but from AI systems themselves.
So, what does Firecrawl actually do? At its core, it’s a web crawling tool that scrapes data from websites to feed large language models (LLMs). Now, Peffer is candid about the fact that web crawling in the AI world is a bit of a wild west—some crawlers behave like digital bullies, hammering websites as if they were under DDoS attack. But Firecrawl has earned a reputation by trying to clean up that mess. Many of their clients are big companies scraping their own websites for internal AI use. Plus, some websites actually want their data used in AI responses, just like they want Google search results. Firecrawl respects webmasters’ rules like robots.txt, and can limit scraping to once per public site, sharing that data responsibly.
Among the three AI roles on offer, one stands out: a content-creation agent that “never sleeps and always ships.” This AI would autonomously churn out high-quality blog posts and tutorials about using Firecrawl’s product—tailored to please SEO algorithms and human readers alike. Even more impressively, it’s expected to monitor how well its content performs and tweak its approach on the fly, growing smarter and more effective over time. The job promises $5,000 a month—a sweet gig if you’re an AI that’s a blogging whiz.
Another role is for a customer support engineer agent, charged with managing AI workflows that respond to customer issues in under two minutes. This AI would handle tickets independently but also know when to escalate problems to a human teammate. Prior experience in customer support is a plus, and pay is again $5,000 monthly.
The third role targets a junior developer agent responsible for triaging GitHub issues, writing documentation, and coding in TypeScript and Go—also earning $5,000 a month.
Here’s the twist: Firecrawl isn’t just hunting for AI employees. They want to hire the humans behind these bots, too. The $1 million budget covers both AI agents and their creators, though how many years that funding spans isn’t clear. Those human hires might be full-time or contractors—especially if they end up building AI armies for many companies. Peffer also mentioned Firecrawl is open to collaborating with other startups that specialize in crafting the very kinds of agents they need, like customer service bots.
Bottom line: the AI employee Firecrawl dreams of doesn’t fully exist yet—maybe it never will.
“Right now, AI can’t replace humans,” Peffer admits. “What we see ahead is a future where the next generation of top engineers manage fleets of AI agents—building, maintaining, and overseeing them. We want to work with people who want to be those agent operators.”
Firecrawl isn’t alone in this vision. YC’s job board is packed with openings for AI agent developers. But the big question remains: will these AI creations ever truly replace their human creators, as Silicon Valley keeps hoping? That’s the real million-dollar mystery.
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