Research, ML

Exa; Singapore; On-site; SGD 120,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Premium healthcare

Fertility benefits

Parental leave (16 weeks)

Wellness stipend

Job summary

Exa is an applied AI lab focused on building a new generation of search systems. This role is in-person in Singapore, where you will train embedding models and prototype transformer-based search architectures to retrieve vast knowledge efficiently.

You will create large-scale datasets, develop evaluation protocols, and push our state-of-the-art beyond current limits while collaborating with a world-class ML team.

Qualifications

• Graduate-level ML experience (or exceptionally strong undergrad).
• Ability to code a transformer from scratch in PyTorch.
• Enjoy creating large-scale datasets and exploring data deeply.
• Care about finding high-quality knowledge and its impact.

Responsibilities

• Train embedding models for search quality in large-scale corpora.
• Design novel transformer-based search architectures.
• Create datasets and evaluation protocols to beat current SOTA models.
• Collaborate with a high-caliber ML team to advance the product.

Skills

ML experience

PyTorch transformer

Large-scale datasets

Knowledge quality focus

Education

Graduate degree in ML

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

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.

Research at Exa

The ML organization sits at the heart of our mission. We train foundational models for search. Our goal is to build systems that can instantly filter the world's knowledge to exactly what you want, no matter how complex your query. Basically, put the web into an extremely powerful database.

We're looking for an ML Research Engineer to train embedding models for perfect search over the web. The role involves dreaming up novel transformer-based search architectures, creating datasets, creating evals, beating our internal SoTA, and repeat.

Desired Experience

• You have graduate-level ML experience (or are an exceptionally strong undergrad)

• You can code up a transformer from scratch in PyTorch

• You like creating large-scale datasets and diving deeply into the data

• You care about the problem of finding high quality knowledge and recognize how important this is for the world

Example Projects

• Pre-training: Train a hundred billion parameter model

• Fine-tuning: Build an RLAIF pipeline for search

• Dream up a novel architecture for search in the shower, then code it up and beat our best model's top score

• Build an eval system that answers: How do we know we're advancing our search quality? (this is an incredibly difficult question to answer)

Logistics

• Location: This is an in-person opportunity in Singapore.

• Visas: We’re happy to sponsor international candidates! 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.