Skip to main content

Software Engineer, Backend

Posted yesterday

exaMillbrae (CA)

SENIORITY

Lead

Apply (opens in a new tab)

About the role

Exa is building a search engine from scratch to serve every AI application. We build massive-scale infrastructure to crawl the web, train state-of-the-art embedding models to index it, and develop super high performant vector databases in Rust to search over it. We also own a $5M H200 GPU cluster that regularly lights up tens of thousands of machines. As a backend engineer, you'd play a critical role in our backend system. 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 100msThis is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco. We're happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3).

Before you apply

Applying takes about a minute. These four things decide how fast it moves after that.

Your profile is current

It's what we read first. Occupations, seniority and locations matter more than a long history.

Two examples you can talk through

Not a portfolio — just two pieces of work where you can explain the decisions and what you'd change.

A number in mind

What you're on now and what would make you move. We negotiate better when we know both.

Your notice period

Employers plan around it, and it's the question that stalls offers most often.

Once you apply, someone reads it and calls you before anything reaches the employer — usually within two working days.

More like this