Research Engineer, Generalist

Exa; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

A technology company is seeking a Generalist Research Engineer in San Francisco to enhance their search engine capabilities. This role offers the opportunity to work on various projects, including improving retrieval performance, enhancing ML models, and optimizing web crawling speed. Candidates must have strong attention to detail and a willingness to work across multiple systems. The company is open to sponsoring international candidates, providing an inclusive environment. Join a team dedicated to increasing the quality of information access.

Qualifications

• Ability to understand customer needs and system implementation details.
• Eager to work across search and retrieval stack including crawling and ML.
• Recognizes the significance of high-quality information in the world.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship a new parser that dramatically improves retrieval performance.
• Improve throughput and latency of ML models.
• Make the web crawler 3x faster.

Skills

Attention to detail

Intellectual curiosity

Multi-system proficiency

Speed and efficiency focus

Job description

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.

Generalist Research Engineers work across our search and retrieval stack: crawling, parsing, ML performance, retrieval algorithms. The team is centered around improving end quality of search endpoints for customers.

Desired Experience

• High attention to detail; simultaneously understand customer needs and implementation details of the system

• Great intellectual horsepower - generalists who are eager to go deep

• You’re excited to work across our search and retrieval stack: crawling, parsing, ML performance, retrieval algorithms and more

• Comfortable working across different systems, and shipping fast

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

Example Projects

• Design and ship a new parser that dramatically improves retrieval performance

• Improve throughput and latency of ML models

• Make our web crawler 3x faster

This is an in‑person opportunity in San Francisco. We’re happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3).