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Research Engineer, Generalist

Exa

Company websiteexa.ai (Exa, opens in new tab)

Base salary $180K  to $350K

Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in San Francisco, CA

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  • LocationSan Francisco, CA
  • WorkplaceOn-site
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (2 h ago) · observed since

About this job

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.

Generalist Research Engineers work across our search and retrieval stack: crawling, parsing, ML performance, retrieval algorithms. The team is centered around improving end quality of search endpoints for customers.


Who You Are

  • High attention to detail; simultaneously understand customer needs and implementation details of the system

  • Great intellectual horsepower - generalists who are eager to go deep

  • You're excited to work across our search and retrieval stack: crawling, parsing, ML performance, retrieval algorithms and more

  • Comfortable working across different systems, and shipping fast

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


What You Could Do

  • Design and ship a new parser that dramatically improves retrieval performance

  • Improve throughput and latency of ML models

  • Make our web crawler 3x faster

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.

Source: Exa on Ashby · View original posting (opens in new tab)

This range next to 6 other live Exa roles with the nearest advertised base floor
Chart as a table
This range next to 6 other live Exa roles with the nearest advertised base floor
RolePublished base
Research Engineer, Generalist (this listing)$180K - $350K
Research Engineer, Index Intelligence$180K - $350K
Manager, Sales Development - NYC$180K - $240K
Research, Evals$180K - $350K
Software Engineer, Security$180K - $350K
Software Engineer, Web Crawling$180K - $350K
Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems$180K - $350K

Same $100K to $400K scale as every card. All Exa roles · How to read the bar

Observed changes

  1. First observed on the employer's board
  2. Began meeting the published-salary criteria
Observed since
Employer-stated posting date
2026-07-07
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: San Francisco, California

USD 180,000 – 350,000 · 1 YEAR · Salary

Method
Structured pay field published by the employer
Checked
Rule set
us-base-v2

The employer's job board publishes this pay as a dedicated data field. We read the field directly; no interpretation was needed.

What we verified

  • The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
  • The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
  • The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.

We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.