Level

Exa

Software Engineer, Intern

Exa is hiring a Software Engineer, Intern in San Francisco, United States. It pays $100k-$200k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Exa.

Level's read on this job

  • On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
  • Exa mentions visa sponsorship in this posting.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include Cursor, C and Rust.
  • Level classifies it as an internship.
  • Level lists 56 other open roles at Exa.

AI in this role

Build massive-scale infrastructure and high-performance vector databases for an AI-powered search engine as an intern.

cursorcrust
ml-systemsvector-databasesdistributed-systems

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.

How we rate this

Software Engineer, Intern at Exa rates 90 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

ML SystemsVector databasesDistributed SystemsCursorCRust

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$100k
Typical software engineer job
$168k

This posting starts 41% below the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a project where ml systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  2. Tell me about a project where vector databases was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. What's a project where you used Cursor hands-on?
  5. Walk me through how you've used C in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: ML Systems, Vector databases, Distributed Systems, Cursor, and C. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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