Firecrawl, a startup supported by Y Combinator, has relaunched its plan to hire AI agents, allocating $1 million for this purpose. The company posted three "AI Agent Only" positions on the YC hiring platform, including content creation agents, customer service engineers, and junior development agents, each with a monthly salary of $5,000.
According to Caleb Peffer, Firecrawl's founder, who spoke to TechCrunch, the new positions received around 50 applications within about a week. However, as reported in February, Firecrawl’s first attempt at AI recruitment failed to find suitable candidates.
Firecrawl is a tool designed for law school (LLM) students to scrape website data. Peffer admitted that web crawling is a sensitive area in the AI ecosystem, where bad crawlers could potentially burden websites like DDoS attacks. However, he emphasized that Firecrawl is popular because it implements various protective measures—many customers are enterprises that only scrape their own data for internal use; the tool supports robot.txt settings and can be configured to scrape public website data once and share it with others.
The job advertisement shows that content creation agents need to "never rest, always deliver," creating high-quality blog posts and product tutorials that meet SEO standards and continuously improve themselves through user engagement metrics. Customer service engineers are required to design AI workflows, respond to customer questions within two minutes, and know when to escalate to human services. Junior development agents are responsible for handling GitHub issues, writing documentation, and coding with TypeScript and Go.
It is worth noting that this $1 million budget will not only be used for AI agents but also for hiring real people to develop these robots. Peffer said they are considering hiring full-time customer service staff or contract workers, and even considering bids from other startups specializing in customer service development.
"Artificial intelligence cannot replace humans yet," Peffer admitted. "What we envision is that in the future, 10 times more engineers will control armies of AI systems built, maintained, and monitored by them. What we want to do is work with those eager to become AI operators."
Firecrawl is not the only company trying this model. The YC hiring platform is filled with proxy developer positions. Whether these AI agents will ultimately replace developers themselves as Silicon Valley expects remains a million-dollar question.