Exa
Software Engineer, Knowledge Engine – Query Engine
$180K–$350K
San Francisco, California · On-site · Full-time · Posted Oct 22, 2026
- Visa sponsorship
- The company is happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3); visa outcomes are not guaranteed.
About the job
Build and operate Exa’s query engine for searching hundreds of billions of evidence-backed claims across distributed graph, vector, full-text, time-series, and geospatial retrieval systems.
What you'll do
- Design storage layouts, partitioning, indexes, and ingestion across retrieval backends.
- Build query planning and execution that selects and combines backends while optimizing performance at scale.
- Ensure consistency, correctness, and reliability, and measure query precision and completeness.
What they ask for
- Deep experience in a distributed database, query engine, search engine, or storage system.
- Strong grasp of indexing, query planning and optimization, and storage formats.
- Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals, including consensus, replication, sharding, and fault tolerance.
- Strong in a systems language (Go, Rust or C++), with production experience profiling and delivering measured latency improvements.
Nice to have
- Graph databases or combining vector, full-text, time-series, and geospatial retrieval.
- Compilers, query language design, or cost-based optimizers.
Pay
$180K – $350K (base salary)
Tools
Go, Rust, C++
AI focus
Build a knowledge query engine that enables agents to answer factual questions precisely and completely using information synthesized from across the web.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative