Building a search engine from scratch to serve every AI application with massive-scale infrastructure and state-of-the-art embedding models.

Exa is revolutionizing AI applications by building a groundbreaking search engine from scratch. The company operates a sophisticated infrastructure including a $5M H200 GPU cluster and handles massive-scale web crawling operations. They're developing cutting-edge embedding models and high-performance vector databases in Rust.

The ML team focuses on training foundational models for search, with the ambitious goal of creating systems that can instantly filter and retrieve precise information from the world's knowledge, regardless of query complexity. This role is perfect for someone passionate about advancing the state of search technology and working with large-scale systems.

As an ML Research Engineer, you'll be at the forefront of developing novel transformer-based search architectures. The position involves working with massive datasets, creating sophisticated evaluation systems, and continuously pushing the boundaries of search technology. You'll be handling hundred-billion parameter models and building RLAIF pipelines for search optimization.

The role offers competitive compensation ($150K-$300K plus equity) and is based in San Francisco, with visa sponsorship available for international candidates. This is an exceptional opportunity for those who want to work on challenging problems in AI and search technology, with access to substantial computational resources and the chance to make a significant impact on how the world accesses information.

The ideal candidate should have graduate-level ML experience, strong PyTorch skills, and a deep interest in large-scale data systems. You'll be joining a team that values innovation and technical excellence, working on projects that directly influence the future of AI-powered search technology.

ML Research Engineer position at Exa, focusing on training embedding models and developing novel transformer-based search architectures with competitive compensation and visa sponsorship.

ML Research Engineer

Exa is revolutionizing the AI search landscape by building a comprehensive search engine from the ground up. The company operates a sophisticated infrastructure including a $5m H200 GPU cluster and manages operations involving thousands of machines. As part of the Agentic Search Team, you'll be at the forefront of developing complex search capabilities that can run from minutes to days.

The role focuses on building and maintaining massive-scale infrastructure for web crawling, training state-of-the-art embedding models, and developing high-performance vector databases in Rust. You'll be working on challenging projects like beating OpenAI's deep research capabilities and building sophisticated agentic orchestration pipelines.

The ideal candidate should have a strong background in high-performance programming languages and either existing LLM prompt engineering experience or the ability to learn quickly. This position offers the opportunity to work on meaningful problems in information retrieval and AI, with access to substantial computational resources and cutting-edge technology.

The position is based in San Francisco with full visa sponsorship available for international candidates. You'll be joining a team that's pushing the boundaries of what's possible in AI search technology, with the flexibility to work on projects that align with your skills and interests. This isn't your average startup - it's a chance to be part of building the future of AI-powered search infrastructure.

Backend Engineer position at Exa, building high-compute search capabilities and agentic orchestration pipelines, offering $150K-$300K with equity and visa sponsorship.

Backend Engineer - Agentic Search Team

Building a search engine from scratch to serve every AI application, with focus on web crawling, embedding models, and vector databases.

Exa is revolutionizing AI applications by building a comprehensive search engine from the ground up. The company specializes in developing massive-scale infrastructure for web crawling, training cutting-edge embedding models, and creating high-performance vector databases in Rust. With a significant investment in hardware, including a $5M H200 GPU cluster, Exa manages operations involving thousands of machines.

The Infrastructure Team plays a crucial role in developing the foundational tooling and infrastructure that powers all of Exa's systems. They're seeking infrastructure engineers to enhance their engineering capabilities by building sophisticated systems like GPU cluster orchestration in Kubernetes, implementing map-reduce batch jobs on Ray, and creating world-class observability tooling.

This role offers an exciting opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology and scale. You'll be handling projects such as building Kubernetes orchestration for multi-million dollar GPU clusters, scaling AWS batch job systems, and optimizing GPU scheduling for maximum efficiency. The position requires someone with extensive experience in large-scale infrastructure and a meticulous approach to system reliability and optimization.

The position is based in San Francisco, offering a competitive salary range of $150K-$300K plus equity. The company provides visa sponsorship for international candidates (STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3), demonstrating their commitment to attracting top talent globally. This is an excellent opportunity for experienced infrastructure engineers who want to work on challenging problems at the intersection of AI and large-scale systems.

Senior Infrastructure Engineer position at Exa, building and scaling GPU clusters and cloud systems for AI applications, offering $150K-$300K plus equity in San Francisco.

Infra Engineer

Building web-scale systems for search with a focus on high-compute search layer to retrieve and synthesize knowledge at scale.

Exa is at the forefront of revolutionizing web-scale search systems, with their Agentic Search Team leading the charge in developing cutting-edge high-compute search layer technology. This role presents an exciting opportunity for a Full Stack Engineer to join their mission of transforming how humans and machines interact with information.

The position demands a versatile engineer who can seamlessly navigate both frontend and backend development, with particular emphasis on React/Node projects. You'll be instrumental in creating innovative solutions like the Exa Chat frontend, optimizing web crawler performance, and pioneering new ways to integrate LLMs with Exa's search capabilities.

The ideal candidate should possess strong technical skills and be comfortable wearing multiple hats across different areas of the business. This includes everything from core engineering tasks to contributing to sales and marketing initiatives. A particular interest in prompt engineering and its applications is highly valued, though the company is willing to help the right candidate develop this expertise.

What makes this role particularly compelling is its position at the intersection of AI, search technology, and knowledge management. You'll be working on solving fundamental challenges in how we access and synthesize information at scale. The company offers competitive compensation ($150K-$300K), equity participation, and visa sponsorship for international candidates.

Based in San Francisco, this in-person role offers the opportunity to work directly with a team that values face-to-face collaboration and maintains a strong in-person culture. If you're passionate about improving how the world accesses and utilizes knowledge, and you're excited about building the next generation of search technology, this role at Exa could be your next career-defining move.

Full Stack Engineer position at Exa, focusing on building web-scale search systems and high-compute search layer for knowledge retrieval and synthesis.

Full Stack Engineer - Agentic Search Team

Search is our interface to information. A search engine with new capabilities -- creativity, memory, analogy -- will change what we know and how we think.

Exa is a search engine built for AIs, enabling developers to filter the internet's content with complex queries to bring the world's knowledge into their AI apps. Founded in 2021, we're a team of 22 people based in San Francisco, backed by Y Combinator (S21 batch).

We're looking for research scientists and research engineers to join our team. We have a lot of compute per capita and have a good shot at defining a future technology. This is an opportunity to work on cutting-edge ML research and development in search technology.

Key requirements:
- Graduate level ML experience (or exceptionally strong undergrad background)
- Eye for fundamental, novel architectures that can scale
- Ability to implement your own ideas and create large-scale datasets
- For research engineer applicants: Strong understanding of performance optimization and distributed computing

We encourage applications even if you don't meet all criteria, as exceptional researchers often come from non-traditional paths. You'll be working directly with the founding team, including CEO Will Bryk who studied CS and physics at Harvard and has prior ML startup experience.

Join us in revolutionizing how AI systems access and process information through next-generation search technology. We're building something that could fundamentally change how knowledge is discovered and utilized.

ML Research Engineer position at Exa, building next-generation search capabilities for AI systems with focus on creativity, memory, and analogy.

Exa Engineering Jobs

Building a search engine from scratch to serve every AI application with massive-scale infrastructure and state-of-the-art embedding models.