SINGAPORE — Exa, a startup that builds search infrastructure for artificial intelligence applications, is opening an office in Singapore as part of an expansion into the Asia-Pacific region. The company plans to hire up to 10 engineers across backend, infrastructure, and product roles in the coming months, adding to what is currently only a handful of staff in the region.

The Singapore office will focus on building large-scale infrastructure, including data pipelines and crawling systems designed to gather and process information across the internet, according to Will Bryk, Exa's chief executive officer. The company is also actively hiring in San Francisco and Zurich.

"Singapore has some of the best engineering talent in the world," Bryk said. "People are really smart, and they have a lot of hustle."

Founded in 2021, Exa has about 80 employees globally and serves web search to thousands of customers, including AI startups such as Cursor, as well as private equity and consulting firms. The company raised $85 million in a Series B round in September at a $700 million valuation. That round was led by Benchmark, with participation from Lightspeed, YCombinator, and NVentures, Nvidia's venture capital arm.

Bryk said the company prioritizes candidates' values above all else and is open to hiring both junior and senior engineers. He said experience matters less than a passion for building search or large-scale systems. "I don't believe it when people say you can't do something. So I think we want engineers who feel the same way," he said.

"Do they really have passion for building search or building large-scale systems?" he said. "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."

The company's hiring process includes flying candidates to San Francisco to work with the existing team for one to two days. "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 eat with them at lunch and dinner. You really get to know a person," he said.

"The whole world of search is shifting," he said. "The number of searches from AIs are going to exceed the number of humans."

Search systems built for AI applications are still a relatively new field and require rethinking how search works, as humans and AI interact with information differently. Most of the company's code is written by AI, and Bryk said the best engineers should be able to move quickly and use AI tools effectively.