Senior Query Engine Engineer - Distributed Systems

Exa; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Premium healthcare benefits

Fertility benefits

16 weeks paid parental leave

Monthly wellness stipend

Job summary

Exa, an applied AI lab, is building a groundbreaking search engine. You will own the query engine that searches hundreds of billions of claims across multiple backends, from graphs to vector and geospatial indexes.

This greenfield role shapes storage layout, indexing, and the planner routing work between backends, with every query relying on these foundations. You will work in the Knowledge Platform team to synthesize a world-scale knowledge graph, improving retrieval precision, latency, and

Qualifications

• Experience inside a distributed database, query engine, search engine or storage system.
• Strong grasp of indexing, query planning and optimization; storage formats.
• Fluency with systems languages (Go, Rust or C++).
• Proven ability to optimize latency and throughput in production.

Responsibilities

• Own storage and indexing across backends for graph, vector, full-text, time-series and geospatial retrieval.
• Design cost-based search planning and decide backend usage, join order and plan execution.
• Maintain high throughput with low latency under heavy concurrent load.
• Ensure consistent query results during data convergence and versioning.
• Measure precision and completeness with end-to-end checks and metrics.

Skills

Distributed databases

Query engine design

Go/Rust/C++

Indexing and storage

Performance optimization

Tools

Graph databases

Vector/full-text/geo retrieval

Job description

Exa, an applied AI lab, is building a groundbreaking search engine. You will own the query engine that searches hundreds of billions of claims across multiple backends, from graphs to vector and geospatial indexes.

This greenfield role shapes storage layout, indexing, and the planner routing work between backends, with every query relying on these foundations. You will work in the Knowledge Platform team to synthesize a world-scale knowledge graph, improving retrieval precision, latency, and