---
title: 'Design Engineer at Exa'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/design-engineer-exa-san-francisco-5n1vxazfxec2'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Design Engineer at Exa

- **Company:** Exa
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/exa/237cc096-2234-48ee-9c98-8c7221845484

## Job description

Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine unlike the world has ever seen. We build massive-scale infrastructure to crawl the web, train state-of-the-art embedding models to understand it, and develop high-performance vector databases to retrieve information from it.

Today, Exa powers search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and more than 400,000 developers. We’ve raised $350 million from Lightspeed, Benchmark, and a16z.

Our goal is to build perfect search over all of the world’s information, far beyond what traditional search engines can offer. The interfaces for working with this technology are still being invented, and you’ll help define them.

## ABOUT THE ROLE

We’re looking for a Design Engineer with exceptional visual taste and strong front-end craft to design and build developer-facing experiences across Exa’s product, playground, documentation, website, and brand.

You’ll work directly with product and engineering, moving from early ideas and prototypes to polished, production-ready experiences. There is no traditional design-to-engineering handoff. You’ll use both design and code to explore possibilities, refine interactions, and ship.

Designers at Exa have broad creative license, and the freedom to create and lead new initiatives based on their best judgement. This role will be a great fit for you if you enjoy moving quickly across different kinds of work without compromising on craft.

## WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Work with product and engineering from early exploration through launch
- Design and build polished experiences across Exa’s product, playground, documentation, and website
- Move fluidly between design and code to explore ideas, prototype interactions, and refine implementation
- Design new ways for people and agents to discover, integrate, debug, and build with Exa
- Identify high-impact product opportunities and turn them into clear, polished experiences

## EXAMPLE PROJECTS

- Rethink Exa’s API playground, from its structure and interactions through production implementation
- Design onboarding and documentation that work naturally alongside coding agents
- Create better ways for developers to inspect search results, understand API behavior, and debug integrations

## ABOUT YOU

- You have 4+ years designing and building software
- You have a portfolio of polished, interactive products or prototypes
- You have strong visual and interaction design skills for complex technical products
- You’re fluent in Figma, React, TypeScript or JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and think in reusable components
- You use coding agents to explore, prototype, and ship ideas
- You independently identify opportunities, communicate clearly, and work well through ambiguity

## LOGISTICS

- Location: This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco.
- Visas: 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.
- Benefits: 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.

Exa is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related conditions, criminal histories consistent with applicable law, or any other basis protected by applicable law.

## About Exa

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Exa builds a web-scale search API and deep research engine purpose-built for AI agents and developers, organizing the web for the agentic era.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Will Bryk (CEO) and Jeff Wang (Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: AI search infrastructure, applied AI research, developer tools
- **Target customers**: B2B – developers, AI agent companies, enterprise teams (e.g., Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, Monday.com)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Organize all knowledge” and “reinvent how the world gets information” – building a search engine for the AI era that exceeds the quality and latency of traditional search.

## Products & Services
- **[Exa Search API](https://exa.ai/)**: A high‑throughput web search API delivering results in under 180ms, with support for low‑latency instant search, deep research, crawling, and structured output extraction. Includes “Highlights” (token‑efficient excerpts), company & people search, and code search. SOC 2 Type II certified, zero data retention option, single sign‑on.
- **Exa Embeddings & Neural Retrieval**: Proprietary state‑of‑the‑art embedding models trained on Exa’s own cluster of hundreds of H200s, achieving best‑in‑class accuracy on FRAMES, Tip‑of‑Tongue, and Seal0 benchmarks.
- **Custom AI Search Solution**: Enterprise‑grade search infrastructure that can be tailored for specific verticals and integrated via a single API.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: $2.2 billion (as of May 2026) – reported by Bloomberg and referenced on Exa’s about page.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $111.4 million (Pre‑Seed, Seed, Series A, Series B)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**:
  - **Investors**: Lightspeed Venture Partners (led Series A), Benchmark (led Series B), Nvidia, Y Combinator, and individual advisors such as Tal Broda (former VP of Compute, OpenAI) and researchers from Google/Bing.
  - **Customers & Integrations**: Cursor, Cognition (Devin), HubSpot, OpenRouter, Monday.com, and over 400,000 developers.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount: 75 employees (+127.7% YoY), with active hiring across 17 open roles.
  - Revenue: Not publicly disclosed, but traction with marquee customers and rapid valuation growth from ~$22M (Seed) to $2.2B in under two years.
  - Team distribution across 10 countries, with a strong engineering and research core (26% technical, 5% research).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Web‑scale infrastructure**: Crawls and indexes 500B+ webpages with a proprietary neural retrieval stack that improves predictably with compute.
- **Latency & accuracy leadership**: Fastest search API (<180ms) and top scores on industry benchmarks (FRAMES, Tip‑of‑Tongue, Seal0).
- **Agent‑native design**: Built specifically for the workflow of LLM agents – token‑efficient highlights, structured outputs, and low‑latency to deep research in a single API.
- **Enterprise trust**: SOC 2 Type II, zero data retention, SSO, and privacy controls.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Expand the search infrastructure for the coming “1000x more searches from AI agents than Google today.” Continue investing in end‑to‑end neural architectures, scale the cluster, and deepen integrations with leading AI platforms.
- **Direction**: Become the default “knowledge layer” for all AI agents, reinventing search from a link‑based model to a high‑quality, structured answer engine.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Applied AI research lab with a mission to build the world’s best search engine. In‑person team (San Francisco headquarters) with daily team meals, weekly milk tea, monthly picnics, and regular celebrations.
- **Remote/hybrid policy**: Fully in‑person for most roles, with flexibility for certain positions and visa‑relocation support.
- **Benefits**: Premium medical/dental/vision, monthly wellness and commuter benefit, fertility/family planning reimbursement (up to $15k lifetime), 16 weeks paid parental leave, daily lunch and dinner, snacks, and fresh bread from a local bakery.
- **Engineering culture**: Emphasis on research‑driven engineering – working on massive‑scale indexes, novel retrieval systems, and training state‑of‑the‑art models on Exa’s own H200 cluster.

## Sources
1. [Exa About Page](https://exa.ai/about)
2. [Exa Careers Page](https://exa.ai/careers)
3. [Exa Product Page](https://exa.ai/)
4. [Exa LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/exa-ai)
5. [Y Combinator Company Profile](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/exa)

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