{"id":1234078,"url":"https://alion.io/job/exa-software-engineer-backend-2","title":"Software Engineer, Backend","company":{"id":13137,"name":"Exa","domain":"exa.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/exa","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":23,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":180000,"max":350000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":350000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"Exa","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-06-26T18:15:33Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-06-26","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T21:23:38Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":477,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":476},"description":"Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine unlike the world has ever seen. We build massive-scale infra to crawl the entire web, train state-of-the-art embedding models to process it, and design super high performant vector databases to retrieve over it. We now power search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and over 400,000 developers and have raised $350m from Lightspeed, Benchmark, and a16z.\nOur ultimate goal is to build perfect search over all the world's information, far beyond Google. If you want to build massive-scale ML systems that will define the way the new AI world consumes information, this is the place for you.\nAs a backend engineer, you'd play a critical role in our search architecture. We're pretty flexible on what projects people work on based on their skills and interests.\nDesired Experience\nYou have experience writing and maintaining high throughput, low latency systems\n\nYou can build data processing pipelines that deal with millions of documents per day\n\nYou’re comfortable optimizing a system to an exceptional degree\n\nYou care about the problem of finding high quality information and recognize how important this is for the world\n\nPlus: Experience in some high performance language (C++, Rust, etc.)\n\nExample Projects\nRecreate Google-level keyword search over 10 billion pages in 1 month\n\nBuild a state-of-the-art crawling system that works optimally for any website\n\nBuild a custom vector database that runs over a billion vectors in under 100ms\n\nLogistics\nLocation: This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco.\n\nVisas: We're happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3). While we cannot guarantee your visa, we have historically been successful in sponsoring candidates from all over the world. If you receive an offer, our team will work hard to get you a visa.\n\nBenefits: We offer premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision), fertility benefits, 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents, and a monthly wellness stipend to all of our employees.\n\nExa is an equal opportunity employer. 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