ExaHead of Cloud Partnerships
Exa is hiring a Head of Cloud Partnerships in San Francisco, United States. It pays $200k-$300k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Exa.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this role is Uses AI ●●○○: an ordinary role that requires AI tools.
- The posting mentions visa sponsorship.
- The posting mentions OpenAI, Claude and Anthropic among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as an executive role.
- Exa has 56 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Lead cloud hyperscaler and frontier AI lab partnerships to scale distribution for an AI search platform.
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. Read more
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 & 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.
The role
The Head of Cloud Partnerships at Exa is focused on extracting maximum distribution from the highest-leverage infrastructure in the AI ecosystem. They own one of Exa's most critical distribution layers: the hyperscaler clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) and frontier model labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and others). These partners are the infrastructure through which AI is built and deployed, and Exa's depth of integration here is a direct multiplier on revenue and reach.
You'll own the full relationship stack with each partner: from executive alignment and technical integrations to marketplace presence, co-sell motions with their AEs, and joint launches. Expect to operate with founder-level autonomy and a mandate to make Exa the gold standard partner across these channels..
What you'll do
- Own the outcomes for your portfolio: depth of integration, marketplace listings, sourced and co-sold pipeline, and revenue contribution against ambitious quarterly targets.
- Run the AWS partnership end-to-end: relationship management with PDMs and partner AEs, AWS Marketplace listing and optimization, co-sell activation, field presence at AWS events, and joint outbound with their field teams.
- Eventually scale hyperscaler motions with GCP and Azure: replicate and adapt the AWS playbook across their partner ecosystems, marketplace programs, and co-sell workflows.
- Own frontier lab partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic: joint solutioning with their applied and forward-deployed teams, tool catalog and plugin listings (GPT store, Claude tools, etc.), integration QA and eval support, and joint launches.
- Expand to additional frontier labs and AI platform partners as the ecosystem evolves.
- Drive co-marketing across the portfolio: joint launches, blog posts, demos, and conference moments in lockstep with partner marketing teams.
- Bring the voice of the partner back into product: what their field is seeing, what their customers are building, what's about to change in their stack before we feel it ourselves.
Who You Are
- You've owned cloud or platform partnerships end-to-end at a high-velocity company and can point to specific relationships you built and activated to measurable revenue outcomes.
- You have direct experience partnering with AWS: you know how their partner organization operates, have navigated the co-sell motion, and understand AWS Marketplace mechanics (ISV Accelerate, PDM relationships, APN co-sell).
- You can pick up technical concepts fast (APIs, agent stacks, retrieval, eval workflows) and represent them confidently to partner field engineers, FDEs, and AEs.
- You're comfortable in a high-velocity startup where the portfolio evolves quickly and prioritization decisions sit with you.
Nice to Have
- Broad experience across multiple hyperscaler platforms: GCP Partner Advantage, Microsoft Azure Marketplace, and familiarity with how their co-sell motions and partner incentive structures differ from AWS.
- Existing relationships inside OpenAI, Anthropic, or other frontier labs.
- You've navigated marketplace listings and co-sell programs across more than one cloud platform and have a point of view on what makes listings actually convert.
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.
How we rate this
Head of Cloud Partnerships at Exa rates 40 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Uses AI (AI Level 2 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Uses AI. An ordinary role that requires AI tools.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where cloud partnerships was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where strategic partnerships was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where channel sales was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where ecosystem growth was part of your work. What did you do?
- Walk me through how you've used OpenAI in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Cloud Partnerships, Strategic Partnerships, Channel Sales, Ecosystem Growth, and OpenAI. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Put the AI tool in a bullet point about what you did, not just in a skills list. This role treats it as a required part of the job.
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