Software Engineer, Backend
At a glance
Mid-level Backend Engineering role at Exa. San Francisco · full-time · $180,000–$350,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build and maintain backend systems that handle high request volumes while keeping response times low
- Create data pipelines capable of processing millions of documents each day
- Tune system performance to a very high standard
- Contribute to search architecture, with project choices shaped by your skills and interests
What you bring
- Experience building and maintaining systems designed for high throughput and low latency
- You can develop data pipelines that process millions of documents daily
- You are comfortable pushing system performance through detailed optimization
Who this fits
This role suits a backend engineer interested in search quality and large-scale systems. It is an in-person position in San Francisco. International candidates may be considered for visa sponsorship, though sponsorship is not guaranteed.
From the employer
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.
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Backend Engineering$180k+
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