Research, ML

Department: Research

Location: San Francisco, California

Compensation: $150K – $300K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

Exa is building a search engine from scratch to serve every AI agent. We build massive-scale infrastructure to crawl the web, train state-of-the-art embedding models to process it, and design super high performant vector databases in rust to search over it. If you like compute, we also own a $5M H200 GPU cluster (and soon 5x'ing that) and regularly spin up batchjobs with tens of thousands of machines.

We recently raised an $85M Series B from Benchmark, and we are rapidly building the most intelligent search engine in history. We’re high agency, low-ego, and united by the feeling that this is one of the last problems worth getting right.

On the ML team, we train foundational models for search. Our goal is to build systems that can instantly filter the world's knowledge to exactly what you want, no matter how complex your query. Basically, put the web into an extremely powerful database.

We're looking for an ML Research Engineer to train embedding models for perfect search over the web. The role involves dreaming up novel transformer-based search architectures, creating datasets, creating evals, beating our internal SoTA, and repeat.

Desired Experience

• You have graduate-level ML experience (or are an exceptionally strong undergrad)

• You can code up a transformer from scratch in PyTorch

• You like creating large-scale datasets and diving deeply into the data

• You care about the problem of finding high quality knowledge and recognize how important this is for the world

Example Projects

• Pre-training: Train a hundred billion parameter model

• Fine-tuning: Build an RLAIF pipeline for search

• Dream up a novel architecture for search in the shower, then code it up and beat our best model's top score

• Build an eval system that answers how do we know we're advancing our search quality? (this is an incredibly difficult question to answer)

This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco. We're happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3). In addition to premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision), we also offer fertility benefits and a monthly wellness stipend to all of our employees.