7 hours ago
Zürich, SwitzerlandSenior
Responsibilities
- Own storage layout, partitioning, indexing, bulk snapshot builds, and live ingest across graph, vector, full-text, time-series, and geospatial retrieval backends.
- Design cost-based query planning that selects backends, ordering, joins, traversals, retrievals, filters, and aggregations for each query.
- Optimize p50 and p99 latency, memory use, and per-query cost while serving thousands of queries per second under high concurrency.
- Define consistency behavior across live updates and bulk snapshots, including snapshot promotion, ordered updates, and stable pagination across versions.
- Build deployment checks, evaluations, and metrics for query precision, completeness, correctness, and data quality.
Requirements
- Deep experience working inside a distributed database, query engine, search engine, or storage system.
- Strong understanding of indexing, query planning and optimization, and storage formats.
- Solid knowledge of distributed-systems fundamentals including consensus, replication, sharding, and fault tolerance.
- Strong proficiency in at least one systems language: Go, Rust, or C++.
- Experience profiling systems and shipping measured production latency improvements.
- Strong focus on correctness, reliability, scale, and data quality.
Benefits
- In-person opportunity in Zurich.
- The company sponsors international candidates for visas including STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, and E3, with visa support efforts if an offer is made.
- Premium medical, dental, and vision healthcare benefits.
- Fertility benefits.
- 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents.
- Monthly wellness stipend.
About Exa
Exa builds a web-scale search engine and API for AI agents and developer applications, combining its own crawler, embedding models, and high-performance vector search. It sells usage-based APIs and enterprise integrations that power retrieval-augmented generation, browsing, and automation on live web content. The company runs large crawling infrastructure and dedicated GPU clusters to continuously index and embed pages, and ships low-latency search components written in Rust.