Backend Engineer • Mid-Level

Who you are

You have experience writing and maintaining high throughput, low latency systems — you've dealt with the challenges of building scalable infrastructure and understand the importance of performance in backend engineering. You can build data processing pipelines that handle millions of documents per day — your expertise allows you to optimize systems to an exceptional degree, ensuring they run efficiently and effectively. You care about the problem of finding high-quality information and recognize how crucial this is for the world — your passion for technology drives you to create solutions that make a difference.

Desirable

Experience in high-performance languages such as C++ or Rust is a plus — you understand the nuances of these languages and how they can be leveraged to build robust systems. You are comfortable working in a collaborative environment where flexibility in project selection is encouraged based on individual skills and interests.

What you'll do

As a Backend Engineer at Exa, you'll play a critical role in developing our backend systems for a cutting-edge search engine designed for AI applications. You'll work on projects that include recreating Google-level keyword search over billions of pages and building a state-of-the-art crawling system that optimally processes any website. Your responsibilities will include designing and implementing backend services that are capable of handling vast amounts of data while maintaining low latency. You'll also be involved in building custom vector databases that can efficiently manage and search over a billion vectors in under 100 milliseconds. Collaboration with cross-functional teams will be essential as you contribute to the overall architecture and performance of our systems.

What we offer

We provide an exciting opportunity to work with a $5M H200 GPU cluster that powers our infrastructure, allowing you to engage with cutting-edge technology. Our team is dedicated to fostering a supportive environment where you can grow your skills and take on new challenges. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't match every requirement — your unique perspective could be the key to our success. This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco, and we are happy to sponsor international candidates, making it a welcoming place for talent from around the world.