Job Overview
Job description
- Salary:
- USD 180,000 - 350,000 per year
- Location:
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Work arrangement:
- On-site
Role Summary
Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine unlike the world has ever seen. We build massive-scale infra to crawl the entire web, train state-of-the-art embedding models to process it, and design super high performant vector databases to retrieve over it. We now power search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and over 400,000 developers and have raised $350m from Lightspeed, Benchmark, and a16z.
Our ultimate goal is to build perfect search over all the world's information, far beyond Google. If you want to build massive-scale ML systems that will define the way the new AI world consumes information, this is the place for you.
As a backend engineer, you'd play a critical role in our search architecture. We're pretty flexible on what projects people work on based on their skills and interests.
Requirements
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.)
Benefits
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
LOGISTICS
- Location: This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco.
- Visas: We're happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3). While we cannot guarantee your visa, we have historically been successful in sponsoring candidates from all over the world. If you receive an offer, our team will work hard to get you a visa.
- Benefits: We offer premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision), fertility benefits, 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents, and a monthly wellness stipend to all of our employees.
Exa is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related conditions, criminal histories consistent with applicable law, or any other basis protected by applicable law.
- Role:
- Software Engineer, Backend
- Job Type:
- FullTime
Company profile

Exa
exa.aiExa is an applied AI lab that builds a search engine for developers and AI applications. Its Search API gives AI agents real-time web data, deep research and structured content from one endpoint, drawing on a large index of public web and private information across categories such as news, companies, research, people and financials. Other products include the Contents API, Agent API, Monitors API and Exa Connect. Exa says 500,000 developers build AI on top of its search tools.