Software Engineer, Backend

Department: Engineering

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.

As a backend engineer, you'd play a critical role in our backend system. We're pretty flexible on what projects people work on based on their skills and interests.

Desired Experience

• You have experience writing and maintaining high throughput, low latency systems

• You can build data processing pipelines that deal with millions of documents per day

• You’re comfortable optimizing a system to an exceptional degree

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

• Plus: Experience in some high performance language (C++, Rust, etc.)

Example Projects

• Recreate Google-level keyword search over 10 billion pages in 1 month

• Build a state-of-the-art crawling system that works optimally for any website

• Build a custom vector database that runs over a billion vectors in under 100ms

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.