Supported by the Y Combinator, startup Firecrawl is back on the hunt for AI agent employees. As we reported in February, the first attempt wasn't necessarily worth AI.
However, they have placed three new ads on YC's job board for “AI Agents Only” and have set a total of $1 million to make it happen.
Within about a week after the new job posting was published, there were around 50 applicants, founder Caleb Peffer told TechCrunch.
Firecrawl provides a web crawl tool that removes data from LLMS websites. This is the shaded part of the AI ecosystem, which is the shaded part of the AI ecosystem, where web crawlers can sometimes defeat websites like DDOS attacks. However, Firewcrawl has gained popularity by trying to bring in some guardrails, he says.
For example, many of their customers are shaking their own data for the company's use of internal LLMs. Some websites want data, including data in chatbot responses, just like Google links are required. Additionally, the tool honors robot.txt settings, allowing you to cut public websites once and share data with others.
Therefore, one job is targeted at content creation agents that “do not sleep and always ship.” It autonomously generates tutorials on how to use the blog posts and products that will please “high quality” SEO, says the startup ad. Firecrawl hopes to watch this AI and use it to autonomously improve its audience with its content as well.
In other words, agents need to create, create, post, measure audiences, and grow their mastery autonomously from that feedback. If you're a boundary AI created for your blog, this might be your job. Advertised salary is $5,000 per month.
The company is also looking for a customer support engineer agent who will be tasked with creating AI workflows that can address customer issues within two minutes, handle tickets on its own, and know when it will escalate to humans. Previous experience in providing customer support is required. My salary is also $5,000 a month.
The third opening is for junior developer agents responsible for prioritizing issues in Github issues, creating TypeScript documentation, and prioritizing writing code. Again, my salary is also $5,000 a month.
But here's the catch. Firecrawl wants to hire the human creators and creators behind these bots. And while the $1 million budget is to hire both agents and humans, it's not clear how many years the budget should be covered. A startup could hire a human full-time or as a contractor (which could make more sense if you're creating many agents for many companies). Firecrawl also entertains bids from other startups that specialize in creating the type of agent they are looking for in customer service, says Peffer.
The truth is that the AI employees of Firecrawl's dreams don't exist yet. Maybe it never does.
“AI can't replace humans today,” says Peffer. “In the future, what we're looking at is a world where the next ten times more engineers run an army of agents, the AI systems they're building, maintaining and monitoring. What we want to do is work with those who want to be those agent operators.”
It's not just Firecrawl. YC's job board is full of jobs for agent developers. Will their work replace them as Silicon Valley constantly wants? That's the real million dollar question.