4 hours ago
Base Salary
$180k - $350k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own storage and indexing across graph, vector, full-text, time-series, and geospatial retrieval backends, including partitioning, data layout, bulk snapshots, and live ingest.
- Design cost-based query planning that selects backend order, joins results, and executes traversals, retrievals, filters, and aggregations.
- Optimize p50 and p99 latency, memory usage, and per-query cost while serving thousands of queries per second under high concurrent load.
- Define consistency behavior for converging live updates and bulk snapshots, including snapshot promotion, ordered updates, and stable pagination.
- Build deployment checks, evaluations, and metrics to measure query precision, completeness, correctness, and reliability.
Requirements
- Deep experience working inside a distributed database, query engine, search engine, or storage system.
- Strong understanding of indexing, query planning and optimization, storage formats, and distributed systems fundamentals.
- Knowledge of consensus, replication, sharding, and fault tolerance.
- Strong proficiency in at least one systems language: Go, Rust, or C++.
- Experience profiling systems and delivering measured production latency improvements.
- Strong focus on correctness, reliability, and data quality at scale.
- Bonus experience with graph databases, vector, full-text, time-series, or geospatial retrieval; compilers; query language design; or cost-based optimizers.
Benefits
- In-person role based in San Francisco.
- The company sponsors international candidates, including STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, and E3, while noting that visa approval is not guaranteed.
- 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.