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Research Engineer, Content Understanding

ExaSan Francisco, CaliforniaResearch
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Salary
$180K – $350K
Job type
Full-time
Posted
1 Oct 2026
Status
Open · checked 7d ago

About this role

Exa is seeking a full-time Research Engineer, Content Understanding for its San Francisco, California location. This role is ideal for an experienced machine learning professional who wants to build massive-scale ML systems that define how the AI world consumes information.

Role Overview

Exa is an applied AI lab developing an innovative search engine that goes beyond traditional methods by crawling the web, training embedding models, and utilizing vector databases. The Content Understanding research engineer focuses on what the search engine understands about web pages. Because search quality depends heavily on comprehending page content, this position involves parsing pages, separating content from furniture, classifying page types, assessing usability, extracting publication dates, judging trustworthiness, and identifying unique information across global web pages in multiple languages and formats.

Key Responsibilities

Fix parsing issues on difficult web pages and empirically prove performance improvements.
Train models to evaluate page quality and establish clear definitions of quality for supervision.
Tackle credibility and misinformation challenges by analyzing page claims, source reliability, and content intent.
Determine semantic differences between documents to deduplicate the web effectively.
Build highly accurate classification and extraction systems that operate at web scale affordably.
Design supervision strategies for novel problems lacking existing labels to test learnability.
Trace suboptimal search results back to original page-level predictions and fix issues at the source.

Requirements

Graduate-level machine learning experience, which includes a Master's or PhD with at least 2 years of relevant experience, or an exceptionally strong undergraduate background.
Ability to build a transformer completely from scratch using PyTorch.
Experience training models that remain cost-effective to run at a broad scale.
Passion for building large-scale datasets and working closely with data.
Comfort handling complex problems where ground truth does not yet exist and defining it is required.
Strong commitment to discovering high-quality knowledge for the world.

Skills and Tools

PyTorch
Transformer architecture
Large-scale machine learning systems
Data supervision and dataset creation
Web parsing and document understanding

Salary and Benefits

The annual salary range for this position is $180,000 to $350,000 in USD.

About the Company

Exa builds a unique search engine backed by major investors including Lightspeed, Benchmark, and a16z, and currently powers search for HubSpot, Cognition, Cursor, and hundreds of thousands of developers. The company is an equal opportunity employer committed to inclusive hiring practices across all protected classes.

How to Apply

Interested candidates should visit the official Exa careers page on exa.ai to submit an application.

Skills and tech stack

PyTorch

Questions candidates ask

What is the location of the Research Engineer role?

The position is located in San Francisco, California.

What is the salary range for this position?

The annual salary ranges from $180,000 to $350,000 USD.

What technical framework is required for this role?

Candidates must be able to build a transformer from scratch in PyTorch.

What experience level is needed?

The role requires graduate-level machine learning experience consisting of a Master's or PhD with at least 2 years of relevant experience, or an exceptionally strong undergraduate background.

How can I apply for the job?

You can apply directly on the official Exa careers page at exa.ai.

Ready to apply?

The application is on the official Exa careers page.

Apply on company site