General Counsel

General Counsel

You'll run legal at Firecrawl, all of it. Strategy, risk posture, policy, the team, and the outside firms. Every question about what we can crawl, license, build, sign, and ship comes to you first, and the founders will treat your read as the read.

Firecrawl sits on some of the least settled legal ground in technology. The rules for web data access, AI training data, copyright, and who owns machine-generated output are being written right now: in courtrooms, in regulators' offices, and in the deals companies like ours sign every week. Our General Counsel doesn't wait for that to settle. You'll set Firecrawl's positions, defend them to customers, counterparties, and regulators, and, where it counts, help shape where the law lands.

You'll report to our CEO, lead and finish building the legal team (commercial and product counsel, a technical compliance program lead shared with our CTO, and legal operations), own outside counsel and the legal budget, and sit next to the founders on financings, board matters, and every decision with a legal edge, which at Firecrawl is most of them.

Salary Range: $310,000–$392,000 USD/year

Equity Range: Competitive equity. Details shared during the process.

Location: San Francisco, CA (SF HQ) or Toronto, ON (Toronto Hub). Hybrid, onsite 3+ days a week.

Job Type: Full-Time

Experience: 12+ years of legal experience, including time running or helping run legal in-house at a venture-backed technology company

Work Authorization: Must be authorized to work in the United States. We're not able to sponsor US visas right now, though that may change down the line.

About Firecrawl

Firecrawl is the easiest way to turn the web into data AI agents can use. One API call converts any URL into clean, LLM-ready markdown or structured data. It's the boring-hard problem everyone building with LLMs eventually hits, solved.

In September 2026, we raised a $75M Series B led by Smash Capital, and we're spending it building the largest repository of knowledge in the world. We hit 8 figures in ARR in year one and more than doubled it in year two. We have 187k+ GitHub stars, putting us in the top 40 repositories of all time, and developers, agents, and category-defining AI companies build on us every day. Growth like this is rare, and we're just getting started.

We're a small team punching far above our weight. Everyone here owns a real piece of the product and company, end to end, and runs it themselves. No hiding behind process or headcount.

This is a place for people who want to work at the frontier: an AI company building the infrastructure other AI companies run on, not one bolting AI onto an existing product. We move fast, go deep, and are building the tools superintelligence will rely on to gather data from the web. That library is called Alexandria, and it starts now.

What You'll Do

Set Firecrawl's legal strategy and risk posture, starting with the questions that define the company: what we crawl and how, how we treat robots.txt and publisher opt-outs, what data provenance we stand behind, and where the lines are on AI training data, agents acting on the web for users, and machine-generated output

Own the company's position on web data access and be ready to defend it anywhere: in customer diligence, across a negotiating table, in front of a regulator, or in court if it comes to that. Run disputes, demand letters, and pre-litigation strategy yourself, bringing in outside counsel when the matter warrants it

Run corporate and board legal: financings, governance, the cap table and equity plans, board materials and minutes, and the corporate hygiene that holds up under diligence. You'll act as corporate secretary

Set the commercial legal posture from the top: risk allocation, indemnity and data-provenance positions, fallback ladders, and approval thresholds. Your counsel run the deals. You decide what they can give

Lead privacy, security, and compliance strategy alongside our CTO: GDPR, CCPA, the EU AI Act and the state AI laws behind it, SOC 2 and the enterprise diligence machine, sanctions and export questions, and whether laws written for data brokers reach a company like ours

Steward our open source posture: license strategy, contributor terms, trademark and brand protection, and the line between the project and the product

Advise People and Operations on employment and contractor matters across every country we hire in: EOR and PEO structures, IP assignment that holds across borders, classification, and immigration as we grow into it

Build and lead the legal team: hire, level, and develop the lawyers and legal ops people under you, run outside counsel to a budget, and make legal a function engineers and salespeople route through by choice

Represent Firecrawl in the policy conversation on web data access and AI: industry coalitions, amicus opportunities, and direct engagement with regulators and legislators. Where the law is unsettled, we intend to have a hand in settling it

Cover everything else with a legal edge: insurance, government inquiries, communications review when something goes sideways, and the questions nobody has assigned yet. At our size the GC's scope is the whole company

What We're Looking For

You've run legal somewhere, or been the person who effectively did. GC, deputy GC, or the senior lawyer the founders actually called, at a venture-backed technology company. A first GC seat is fine if you've operated at that altitude and made calls you had to live with

You cover the full field. Corporate, financings, and governance on one side; commercial, product, data, and IP on the other. Deep in at least one, credible in all of them, and honest about where you'll lean on outside counsel

You have a real point of view on web data, AI, and copyright, and you can defend it. You've read the cases, you've watched the licensing market form, and you're not waiting for settled law to take a position

You give business advice, not legal cover. The founders will ask what you would do and expect an answer: a recommendation and a risk read they can act on, not a memo listing every possible exposure. If your default answer is no, this will be frustrating for both of us

You've been in the room when it went wrong. A demand letter, a regulator's inquiry, a deal that died on indemnity, a board meeting with bad news. Calm and clear under that is not a nice-to-have here

You lead lawyers and non-lawyers. You've built or run a small legal team, held outside counsel to a budget, and earned the trust of engineers and salespeople by being fast, clear, and unpretentious

You're an AI super user. Non-negotiable. You already use AI heavily in your own practice, you'll set the standard for the legal team, and you want to push it further than anyone has taken it in this profession

Membership in good standing in at least one US state bar, and either California bar membership or eligibility to register as in-house counsel in California. Preferred: a J.D. from a T14 law school or comparable academic credentials, training at an Am Law 100 firm or a comparably sophisticated firm, and in-house years at a company that scaled fast. Exposure to data licensing, privacy, IP, open source, or data-access disputes is a strong plus

What We're NOT Looking For

A GC who runs legal as the department of no and measures success by risk avoided rather than by what the company shipped and signed

A law firm partner or senior associate who has never had to live inside a company with the consequences of their own advice

A pure corporate and securities lawyer, or a pure commercial lawyer. This seat needs both

Anyone who thinks "can we crawl this" is an obvious yes or an obvious no. Both are wrong, and the whole job lives in the gap

Someone who needs a full team, a CLM platform, and settled law before making a call

Someone who wants the title and the strategy but plans to send the hard,