Software Engineer, Web Crawling
At a glance
Mid-level Software 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 a distributed web crawler designed to process more than one hundred million pages daily
- Tune crawl pacing and rate limits while the crawler works across thousands of domains
- Develop ways to find dynamic pages, render JavaScript, and handle anti-bot defenses
- Create scheduling and prioritization logic that improves crawl coverage and efficiency
What you bring
- You have substantial experience building and scaling web crawlers, or can get up to speed quickly
- You have worked with a high-performance language such as C++ or Rust
- You know TypeScript, Playwright, modern web design or CDP
Who this fits
This mid-level, in-person role suits an engineer focused on large-scale web crawling and system optimization. You'll work on-site in San Francisco. Visa sponsorship is available for international candidates, though approval 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 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.
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