Software Engineer, Knowledge Engine – Query Engine
Job description
Own the query engine of Exa's Knowledge Platform, searching hundreds of billions of evidence-backed claims across graph, vector, full-text, time-series and geospatial retrieval backends. This is greenfield work building storage, indexing and query planning for an open-domain knowledge graph.
At a glance
- Work mode
- On-site · Zurich, Switzerland
- Languages
- English
What you'll do
- Own storage and indexing across backends: data layout, partitioning and indexes for graph, vector, full-text, time-series and geospatial retrieval, with bulk snapshot builds and live ingest that never take the system down
- Decide how best to search: cost-based planning from cardinality estimates that chooses, for each question, which backends to use, in what order and how to join their results, executed as traversals, retrievals, filters and aggregations in one plan
- Make it fast at scale: serve thousands of queries per second, profiling and cutting p50/p99 latency, memory and cost per query under high concurrent load, from on-disk layout to network fan-out
- Keep answers consistent while the data converges: own what a query may see while it converges, including consistent snapshot promotion, ordered application of live updates and stable pagination across versions
- Measure precision and completeness: end-to-end checks every deployment must pass, plus evals and metrics that show when a plan returns wrong results or misses ones it should have found
What we're looking for
- Worked deep inside 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: consensus, replication, sharding and fault tolerance
- Strong in a systems language (Go, Rust or C++)
- Profile before optimizing, with shipped measured latency wins in production
- Obsess over correctness, reliability and data quality as much as scale
Nice to have
- Graph databases, or combining vector, full-text, time-series and geospatial retrieval
- Compilers, query language design or cost-based optimizers
Your team
Knowledge Platform
Builds Exa's knowledge engine, continuously synthesizing information from across the web and beyond into one of the world's largest open-domain knowledge graphs, with hundreds of billions of evidence-backed claims.
Benefits
- Premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision)
- Fertility benefits
- 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents
- Monthly wellness stipend
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About Exa
An applied AI lab building a search engine unlike the world has ever seen
Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine. It builds massive-scale infra to crawl the entire web, trains state-of-the-art embedding models to process it, and designs super high performant vector databases to retrieve over it.
Mission
Build perfect search over all the world's information, far beyond Google
Key facts
- Applied AI / search
- Powers search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and over 400,000 developers
- Raised $350m from Lightspeed, Benchmark, and a16z
Partners & customers