Software Engineer, Backend

Exa; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading tech company in San Francisco is seeking a backend engineer to help build an innovative search engine from scratch. The role involves developing and maintaining high throughput, low latency systems and creating data processing pipelines that handle millions of documents daily. The ideal candidate will have experience with high-performance languages like C++ or Rust. This in-person role offers the chance to work on groundbreaking projects that are critical for information access.

Qualifications

• Experience writing and maintaining high throughput, low latency systems.
• Ability to build data processing pipelines dealing with millions of documents daily.
• Comfortable optimizing a system to an exceptional degree.
• Interest in finding high quality information and its impact.
• Plus: experience in high performance languages (C++, Rust).

Responsibilities

• Play a critical role in backend systems development.
• Work on flexible projects based on skills and interests.
• optimize performance of critical backend paths.

Skills

High throughput systems

Low latency systems

Data processing pipelines

System optimization

High performance language (C++, Rust)

Rust

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.

As a backend engineer, you'd play a critical role in our backend system. 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

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