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 Software Engineer on Knowledge Systems, you’ll help build systems that understand what is true about the world. You’ll work on extracting, connecting, retrieving, and reasoning over knowledge from the web and beyond so AI agents can answer questions with unprecedented precision and completeness.

Desired Experience

• You have experience building and maintaining complex distributed backend systems

• You can build data pipelines that process petabytes of documents, metadata, and unstructured data

• You’re comfortable optimizing systems for correctness, reliability, and scale

• You care deeply about data quality and finding high-quality information

• Plus: experience building systems involving graph traversal, entity resolution, data quality, or truth discovery

Example Projects

• Build a system that can answer every factual question about every person in the world

• Design a new query language for searching, traversing, and reasoning over billions of facts

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.

Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine unlike the world has ever seen. We build massive-scale infrastructure to crawl the web, train state-of-the-art embedding models to understand it, and develop high-performance vector databases to retrieve information from it.

Today, Exa powers search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and more than 400,000 developers. We’ve raised $350 million from Lightspeed, Benchmark, and a16z.

Our goal is to build perfect search over all of the world’s information, far beyond what traditional search engines can offer. The interfaces for working with this technology are still being invented, and you’ll help define them.

About the role

We’re looking for a Design Engineer with exceptional visual taste and strong front-end craft to design and build developer-facing experiences across Exa’s product, playground, documentation, website, and brand.

You’ll work directly with product and engineering, moving from early ideas and prototypes to polished, production-ready experiences. There is no traditional design-to-engineering handoff. You’ll use both design and code to explore possibilities, refine interactions, and ship.

Designers at Exa have broad creative license, and the freedom to create and lead new initiatives based on their best judgement. This role will be a great fit for you if you enjoy moving quickly across different kinds of work without compromising on craft.

What you’ll do

• Work with product and engineering from early exploration through launch

• Design and build polished experiences across Exa’s product, playground, documentation, and website

• Move fluidly between design and code to explore ideas, prototype interactions, and refine implementation

• Design new ways for people and agents to discover, integrate, debug, and build with Exa

• Identify high-impact product opportunities and turn them into clear, polished experiences
  

Example projects

• Rethink Exa’s API playground, from its structure and interactions through production implementation

• Design onboarding and documentation that work naturally alongside coding agents

• Create better ways for developers to inspect search results, understand API behavior, and debug integrations
  

About you

• You have 4+ years designing and building software

• You have a portfolio of polished, interactive products or prototypes

• You have strong visual and interaction design skills for complex technical products

• You’re fluent in Figma, React, TypeScript or JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and think in reusable components

• You use coding agents to explore, prototype, and ship ideas

• You independently identify opportunities, communicate clearly, and work well through ambiguity
  

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.

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 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

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.