Eric Ciarla
Co-Founder at Mendable
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEric Ciarla is a founder-engineer with 7 years of experience building data-driven products and infrastructure for AI, currently co-founding Firecrawl — the YC S22 startup behind the popular web data API used by companies like Amazon, Zapier, and Nvidia. He combines hands-on backend and DevOps skills with product instincts, having implemented core features such as logging, key-based auth, and scalable extraction pipelines in Firecrawl. Previously he co-founded Mendable, an LLM-powered search platform that served millions of queries for enterprise customers including Coinbase and DoorDash, and helped scale SideGuide to a 50,000-developer community. His background spans applied data science and engineering roles at Ford and Fracta, plus an earlier healthtech startup that secured NSF I-CORPS funding, reflecting both technical depth and startup grit. Based in San Francisco, he’s fluent in turning messy web and tabular data into production-ready, LLM-ready formats and often blends product, ops, and engineering to ship reliable AI infrastructure.
7 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
S22, S22 at Y CombinatorEconomics and Philosophy, Economics and Philosophy at University of New Hampshire
English
Github Skills (23)
webscraper10
back-end-development10
scrape10
scraper10
authentication10
user-authentication10
webscraping10
scrapy10
ai10
data-scraping10
crawler10
logging10
backend10
screen-scraping10
llm9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
mendableai/firecrawl
Apr 2024 - Mar 2025
🔥 Turn entire websites into LLM-ready markdown or structured data. Scrape, crawl and extract with a single API.
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:6 reviews, 53 PRs, 147 pushes in 11 months
Contributions summary:Eric implemented logging functionality using Posthog to track job events, which involved modifying backend service code in apps/api/src/services/logging/log_job.ts and creating apps/api/src/services/posthog.ts. Additionally, the user added key-based authentication by creating a new authentication route and controller, and updated the e2e tests to avoid sending the api key in index.test.ts, which indicates a focus on the backend and infrastructure. Furthermore, the user modified models.ts and several other files to add new features.
aiai-scrapingcrawlerdatahtml-to-markdown
mendableai/firecrawl-app-examples
Jun 2024 - Apr 2025
🔥 This repository contains complete application examples, including websites and other projects, developed using Firecrawl.
Contributions:20 PRs, 25 pushes, 1 branch in 9 months
aiai-scrapingdatahtml-to-markdownllm
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