Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco, California

Compensation: $180K – $350K • 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.

As a Data Engineer, you'll architect and build the data infrastructure that powers everything we do—from crawling billions of pages to training our embedding models to serving real-time search. You'll have enormous autonomy in designing systems that scale to hundreds of petabytes. If you've ever wanted to build data pipelines at a scale that most companies only dream about, this is your chance.

Who You Are

• Deep understanding of lakehouse architectures (Delta Lake, Iceberg, Hudi) and when to use them

• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed data processing pipelines

• Hands-on experience with streaming data systems (Kafka, Flink, or similar)

• Familiarity with Ray, Spark, or ClickHouse at production scale

• An obsessive focus on reliability and building systems that don't page you at 3am

Bonus

• Experience with Lance or other vector-native storage formats

• Background in GPU-accelerated data processing (RAPIDS, cuDF)

What You Could Do

• Design a lakehouse architecture that handles 100+ PB of web crawl data

• Build streaming pipelines that process billions of documents per day for real-time indexing

• Architect the data layer for our embedding training infrastructure on Ray

• Scale our ClickHouse deployment to handle analytical queries across petabytes of search logs

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.