Exa

Software Engineer, Intern at Exa (San Francisco, CA)

Exa· San Francisco, CA·

Role details

Work type
Onsite
Employment
Full-Time

Job 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.

Our 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.

As an engineering intern, you'd play a critical role in lots of our projects. We're pretty flexible on what projects people work on based on their skills and interests.

Who You Are

  • Currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, or a related technical field AND are willing to take off a semester to work full time in SF. Remote and part-time interns are not accepted.
  • You have experience with some high performance language (C++, Rust, etc.)
  • You often code technically difficult or interesting projects for fun
  • You care about the problem of finding high quality information and recognize how important this is for the world

What You Could Do

  • Recreate Google-level keyword search over 10 billion pages in 1 month
  • Build a state-of-the-art crawling system that works optimally for any website
  • Build a custom vector database that runs over a billion vectors in under 100ms

This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco. We're happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3).

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.

Why work at Exa

  • 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.

Application questions