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An Nvidia-backed startup is looking for "rebellious" engineers to help rebuild search for the AI era.Exa, which builds search infrastructure for AI applications, said it is opening a Singapore office on Monday as part of its push into Asia-Pacific.
Exa has only a handful of 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 Byrk said he is hiring "rebellious" engineers."Someone who doesn't care about the status quo, how things were done in the past, can think from first principles about everything — that's really important," he said.Search systems built for AI are still new, and they require rethinking how search works because humans and AI behave differently, he added."I don't believe it when people say you can't do something. So I think we want engineers who feel the same way," Byrk said.Byrk also said Exa prioritizes candidates' values above all else, and the company is open to hiring junior and senior engineers."Do they really have passion for building search or building large-scale systems?" he said, adding that experience is "not as important."To assess candidates for their character, Exa flies them to San Francisco to work with the team for one to two days. Exa has about 80 employees globally and is actively hiring in San Francisco, Zurich, and Singapore."That allows us to really see what a person's like, because you don't just get to see their output on a real project, but you also, you know, eat with them at lunch and dinner," he said. "You really get to know a person."Byrk added that the best engineers should move fast and use AI tools effectively. Most of the company's code is written by AI, he said.Exa raised $85 million in a Series B round led by Benchmark in September at a $700 million valuation. Investors include Lightspeed, YCombinator, and NVentures, Nvidia's venture capital arm.The company, founded in 2021, said it serves web search to thousands of customers, including AI startups such as Cursor, as well as private equity and consulting firms."The number of searches from AIs are going to exceed the number of humans," Byrk told Business Insider. "The whole world of search is shifting."Byrk said the Singapore office will serve as a "massive scale infrastructure," including data pipelines and crawling infrastructure to gather and process information across the internet."Singapore has some of the best engineering talent in the world," Byrk said. "People are really smart, and they have a lot of hustle."Do you have a story to share about AI startups in Asia? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.
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