Head of AI Research
Exa
Posted: June 26, 2025
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Quick Summary
We are seeking a highly skilled AI researcher to lead the development of a massive-scale search engine from scratch, with a focus on building foundational models for search and developing high-performance vector databases in Rust.
Required Skills
Job Description
Exa is building a search engine from scratch to serve every AI application. We build massive-scale infrastructure to crawl the web, train state-of-the-art embedding models to index it, and develop super high performant vector databases in rust to search over it. We also own a $5M H200 GPU cluster that regularly lights up tens of thousands of machines.
On the ML team, we train foundational models for search. Our goal is to build systems that can instantly filter the world's knowledge to exactly what you want, no matter how complex your query. Basically, put the web into an extremely powerful database.
We're seeking a Head of AI Research to repeatedly define our research direction and then achieve it. This role involves leading and growing a world-class research team and also doing significant amount of research toward extremely powerful ML systems for search.
Desired Experience
• 4+ years of AI research experience in industry or university
• Track record of breakthrough research in language models or information retrieval
• Deep expertise in transformers, large-scale distributed training, or embedding models
This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco. We're happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3).