Forward Deployed Engineer, SF

About Exa

We raised a $250M Series C to build the search engine for AIs. Led by a16z, with existing investors Benchmark, Lightspeed, and YC doubling down, the round brings Exa's valuation to $2.2 billion.

Exa is building a search engine for the AI era. Our Search API currently powers Agents, Fortune 500s, and AI labs as we transform an industry that hasn't been disrupted since the 90s. We're a largely SF-based team of ~100 from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, ex-founders, and dropouts alike.

We are rapidly building the most intelligent search engine in history. We're high agency, low-ego, and united by the feeling that this is one of the last problems worth getting right.

About the Role

Forward Deployed Engineers are the implementation and technical specialists. Once a customer signs, you become their engineering partner: you get them to production fast, make Exa a load-bearing part of their stack, and grow the account from there. You sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success, and you're measured on adoption, consumption, retention, and expansion.

You'll embed directly with customers' engineering teams to solve real problems with Exa's API. When something breaks, you fix it. When a feature is missing, you build it. When usage dips, you know why before the customer tells you. You're also our specialist bench: when a presales deal needs deeper expertise than our Solutions Architects have, you get pulled in to win it. This is not a support role. You are an engineer who owns the customer outcome.

In this role, you will:

• Onboard new customers and take them from signed contract to production integration, owning the technical plan, milestones, and time-to-value

• Drive consumption and adoption by finding new use cases, teams, and workloads inside each account and helping customers build them

• Make Exa sticky by architecting integrations that are deeply embedded in customers' products, agents, and pipelines

• Anticipate churn and contraction risk by monitoring usage data, quality signals, and customer interactions, then acting on issues before they become escalations

• Identify and drive expansion with Account Executives, from usage growth to new products and commit upgrades

• Debug and resolve technical issues across the full stack, from API behavior and retrieval quality to the customer's application code

• Partner with Support to make sure customer issues are triaged, escalated, and resolved quickly, acting as the technical point of contact on escalations and closing the loop with the customer

• Serve as a technical specialist in presales when Solutions Architects need deeper expertise on complex evaluations, custom architectures, or strategic accounts

• Turn customer feedback into product improvements, spotting patterns across accounts and shipping fixes yourself when possible

• Run technical reviews with customer CTOs, engineering leads, and PMs to align on roadmap, performance, and what's next

Requirements

• Several years of programming experience. You could build and deploy a production server from scratch

• Experience working inside real codebases and production systems, ideally with search, retrieval, LLMs, or data pipelines

• Track record of high performance in demanding environments, whether that's a top CS program, a competitive sport, a startup, or something else entirely

• Comfort owning customer relationships over the long term and holding your own in high-stakes technical conversations

• An analytical mindset: you can read usage data, spot trends, and turn them into a plan

• High tolerance for context-switching, ambiguity, and sustained intensity

• Willingness to travel as needed for customer engagements

You might excel if you...

• Have built and shipped user-facing products end to end

• Have worked as a software engineer, forward deployed, solutions, or customer engineer, or in a technical account management role with real ownership

• Have driven retention, expansion, or usage growth at a previous company

• Thrive in early-stage environments where your job description changes monthly

• Are energized by the idea of being the person customers think of when they think of Exa

• Care deeply about the problem of organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines

This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco. We're happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3). In addition to premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision), we also offer fertility benefits and a monthly wellness stipend to all of our employees.

Exa is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related conditions, criminal histories consistent with applicable law, or any other basis protected by applicable law.