Software Engineer, Infrastructure
Software Engineer, Infrastructure
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.
Our Infrastructure Team builds the underlying tooling and infrastructure that powers all Exa's systems. Basically, infra engineers build the machine that builds the machine so that we can move as fast as possible as an engineering org. That could mean building GPU cluster orchestration in Kubernetes, map-reduce batchjobs on Ray, or the best observability tooling in the world.
Who You Are
You’re obsessed with scale and complex distributed systems
You have an aversion to ClickOps and would always build an automation
You max out OSS models’ GPU flops utilization just for the challenge
You play with Arch or NixOS as a personal driver for fun or ideology
You’re passionate and discerning about AI tooling — AI can 10x our velocity but also 10x the strain on our systems (CI, etc) and that challenge excites you
What You'll Do
Scale infrastructure to process the whole web on GPUs cost efficiently
Orchestrate multi-region, multi-cloud inference and training on GPUs
Ship a new version of our LLM gateway
Make the world's most advanced build cache with Nix
Build custom CI and code infrastructure that scales for our agent fleet
Automate software maintenance and improvements for the whole company
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.
Software Engineer, Web Crawling
Software Engineer, Web Crawling
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 Web Crawler engineer, you'd be responsible for crawling the entire web. Basically build Google-scale crawling!
Who You Are
You have extensive experience building and scaling web crawlers, or would be excited to ramp up very quickly
You have experience with some high performance language (C++, Rust, etc.)
You are familiar with TypeScript, Playwright, modern web design, CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol)
You’re comfortable optimizing a system to an exceptional degree
You care about the problem of finding high quality knowledge and recognize how important this is for the world
What You Could Do
Build a distributed crawler that can handle 100M+ pages per day
Optimize crawl politeness and rate limiting across thousands of domains
Design systems to detect and handle dynamic content, JavaScript rendering, and anti-bot measures
Create intelligent crawl scheduling and prioritization algorithms for maximum coverage efficiency
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.
Software Engineer, Backend
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.
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
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.
Forward Deployed Engineer
About Exa
We raised a $250M Series C to build the search engine for AIs. Led by a16z, with existing investors Benchmark, Lightspeed, and YC doubling down, the round brings Exa's valuation to $2.2 billion.
Exa is building a search engine for the AI era. Our Search API currently powers Agents, Fortune 500s, and AI labs as we transform an industry that hasn't been disrupted since the 90s. We're a largely SF-based team of ~100 from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, ex-founders, and dropouts alike. 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.
About the Role
Forward Deployed Engineers are the technical tip of the spear at Exa. You sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success, turning complex integrations into production wins. You need to be someone who can ship code in the morning and close a deal in the afternoon.
You'll embed directly with customers' engineering teams to solve real problems with Exa's API. You'll context-switch constantly across accounts, codebases, and industries. When something breaks, you fix it. When a feature is missing, you build it. When a customer is stuck, you unblock them before they even ask. This is not a support role. You are an engineer who sells and a seller who ships.
In this role, you will:
Take a customer from first cold outbound to production integration to closed deal
Build and ship demos, tutorials, and sample applications that show what Exa can do
Debug and resolve technical issues across the full stack, from API behavior to frontend rendering
Identify patterns in customer feedback and translate them into product improvements, shipping fixes yourself when possible
Run many sales and technical calls each week, adapting your pitch to CTOs, engineers, and PMs alike
Analyze usage data and customer interactions to spot churn risk early and drive expansion
Requirements
Several years of programming experience. You could build and deploy a production server from scratch
Track record of high performance in demanding environments, whether that's a top CS program, a competitive sport, a startup, or something else entirely
Comfort with direct customer interaction. You've sold something, supported someone, or otherwise held your own in high-stakes conversations
High tolerance for context-switching, ambiguity, and sustained intensity
Willingness to travel as needed for customer engagements
You might excel if you...
Have built and shipped user-facing products end to end
Have closed revenue or driven commercial outcomes at a previous company
Thrive in early-stage environments where your job description changes monthly
Are energized by the idea of being the person customers think of when they think of Exa
Care deeply about the problem of organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines
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.
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.
Software Engineer, Backend
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.
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
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.
Forward Deployed Engineer
About Exa
We raised a $250M Series C to build the search engine for AIs. Led by a16z, with existing investors Benchmark, Lightspeed, and YC doubling down, the round brings Exa's valuation to $2.2 billion.
Exa is building a search engine for the AI era. Our Search API currently powers Agents, Fortune 500s, and AI labs as we transform an industry that hasn't been disrupted since the 90s. We're a largely SF-based team of ~100 from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, ex-founders, and dropouts alike. 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.
About the Role
Forward Deployed Engineers are the technical tip of the spear at Exa. You sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success, turning complex integrations into production wins. You need to be someone who can ship code in the morning and close a deal in the afternoon.
You'll embed directly with customers' engineering teams to solve real problems with Exa's API. You'll context-switch constantly across accounts, codebases, and industries. When something breaks, you fix it. When a feature is missing, you build it. When a customer is stuck, you unblock them before they even ask. This is not a support role. You are an engineer who sells and a seller who ships.
In this role, you will:
Take a customer from first cold outbound to production integration to closed deal
Build and ship demos, tutorials, and sample applications that show what Exa can do
Debug and resolve technical issues across the full stack, from API behavior to frontend rendering
Identify patterns in customer feedback and translate them into product improvements, shipping fixes yourself when possible
Run many sales and technical calls each week, adapting your pitch to CTOs, engineers, and PMs alike
Analyze usage data and customer interactions to spot churn risk early and drive expansion
Requirements
Several years of programming experience. You could build and deploy a production server from scratch
Track record of high performance in demanding environments, whether that's a top CS program, a competitive sport, a startup, or something else entirely
Comfort with direct customer interaction. You've sold something, supported someone, or otherwise held your own in high-stakes conversations
High tolerance for context-switching, ambiguity, and sustained intensity
Willingness to travel as needed for customer engagements
You might excel if you...
Have built and shipped user-facing products end to end
Have closed revenue or driven commercial outcomes at a previous company
Thrive in early-stage environments where your job description changes monthly
Are energized by the idea of being the person customers think of when they think of Exa
Care deeply about the problem of organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines
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.
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.
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