Research, ML

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 400000 developers and have raised $350m from Lightspeed Benchmark and a16z.

Our ultimate goal is to build perfect search over all the worlds 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.

Research at Exa

The ML organization sits at the heart of our mission. We train foundational models for search. Our goal is to build systems that can instantly filter the worlds knowledge to exactly what you want no matter how complex your query. Basically put the web into an extremely powerful database.

Were looking for an ML Research Engineer to train embedding models for perfect search over the web. The role involves dreaming up novel transformer-based search architectures creating datasets creating evals beating our internal SoTA and repeat.

Desired Experience

• You have graduate-level ML experience (or are an exceptionally strong undergrad)

• You can code up a transformer from scratch in PyTorch

• You like creating large-scale datasets and diving deeply into the data

• You care about the problem of finding high quality knowledge and recognize how important this is for the world

Example Projects

• Pre-training: Train a hundred billion parameter model

• Fine-tuning: Build an RLAIF pipeline for search

• Dream up a novel architecture for search in the shower then code it up and beat our best models top score

• Build an eval system that answers: How do we know were advancing our search quality (this is an incredibly difficult question to answer)

Logistics

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

• Visas: Were 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.