Design Engineer

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.

We're looking for a Designer with strong visual taste to help drive rich, developer-friendly experiences across web and brand.

Designers at Exa have broad creative license, and the freedom to create and lead new initiatives based on your best product judgement. We expect a broad set of skills and the ability to create high-quality designs, interactions, and prototypes. If you are a versatile designer who enjoys rapidly iterating on a variety of projects, this might be the right role for you.

What you will do

• Lead Exa's product design across all platforms and touch points.

• Explore visual designs in Figma or Claude/Codex/Cursor and translate them into web-native experiences.

• Iterate on the future of agent-native experiences: how does this new wave of autonomous agents change the way that people discover, integrate, and build with our product?

• Identify and pursue new areas of product growth; create and iterate on product flows and high-fidelity visuals.

Example projects

• Work with front-end engineering to develop the flow, layout, and features of our API playground.

• Design novel onboarding, documentation, and debugging experiences that are seamless with coding agent workflows.

About you

• Proficiency in design tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe Creative Suite.

• Experience using coding agents to ship projects and iterate on designs.

• Strong curiosity for the latest tools: coding agents, design libraries, shaders.

• Expertise in UX/UI principles for complex technical products.

• A strong perspective and good judgement. 3+ years of experience, with ideally at least 1-2 years of in-house design experience.

• You thrive in high velocity, high growth, scrappy startup environments

Logistics

• Location: This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco.

• Visas: We're happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3). While we cannot guarantee your visa, we have historically been successful in sponsoring candidates from all over the world. If you receive an offer, our team will work hard to get you a visa.

• Benefits: We offer premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision), fertility benefits, 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents, and a monthly wellness stipend to all of our employees.