An Nvidia-backed startup is looking for “rebel” engineers to help reimagine search for the age of AI.
Exa, which builds search infrastructure for AI applications, announced on Monday the opening of a Singapore office as part of its expansion into the Asia-Pacific region. Exa has a small staff in Asia Pacific and plans to hire up to 10 engineers across backend, infrastructure and product roles in the coming months.
In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, CEO Will Burke said the company is hiring “rebellious” engineers.
“People who don’t care about the way things are or what they’ve done in the past can think about everything from first principles, which is really important,” he says.
Search systems built for AI are still new, and humans and AI behave differently, so we need to rethink how search works, he added.
“I don’t believe when people say something can’t be done, so I think we’re looking for engineers who feel the same way,” Burke said.
Burke also said that Exa puts its candidates’ values above all else, and the company is open to hiring junior and senior engineers.
“Are you really passionate about building search or building large systems?” he said, adding that experience “doesn’t really matter.”
To assess a candidate’s personality, Exa flies them to San Francisco and works with the team for a day or two. Exa has approximately 80 employees worldwide and is actively recruiting in San Francisco, Zurich, and Singapore.
“This allows you to really get to know what the person is like, because not only can you see their work on real projects, but you can also have lunch and dinner with them,” he said. “You really get to know the person.”
Byrk added that good engineers need to move quickly and use AI tools effectively. He said most of the company’s code is written by AI.
Expansion into Singapore
Exa raises $85 million in Series B round Benchmark led in September with a valuation of $700 million. Investors include Lightspeed, YCombinator, and NVentures, the venture capital arm of Nvidia.
The company was founded in 2021 and said it provides web search to thousands of customers, including AI startups such as Cursor, as well as private equity and consulting firms.
“AI will do more searches than humans,” Burke told Business Insider. “The whole world of search is changing.”
Mr Burke said the Singapore office will serve as a “large scale infrastructure”, including data pipelines and crawling infrastructure for collecting and processing information on the internet.
“Singapore has some of the best engineering talent in the world,” Mr Burke said. “People are really smart and really enthusiastic.”
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