Forward Deployed Engineer Lead

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

You'll lead a team of Forward Deployed Engineers covering US East, based in our New York office. Your team owns what happens after the deal closes: getting customers to production fast, making Exa a load-bearing part of their stack, and growing the accounts and/or expanding into new use cases. You're measured on revenue: retention and expansion across your team's accounts.

This is a player-coach role. You'll lead the team and still carry the technical depth of a senior FDE: you debug customer integrations, review architectures and step into the most important accounts yourself.

In this role, you will:

• Lead and grow the US East FDE team in New York: hiring, onboarding, coaching and performance

• Own the outcomes on your team's accounts: onboarding to production, adoption, consumption growth, retention and expansion, in partnership with the Account Executives

• Drive your team's key metrics: retention and expansion revenue, time to production, consumption growth, and churn and contraction avoided, tracked weekly with the Americas FDE Leader

• Stay hands-on: join critical onboardings and escalations, review integrations and help the team solve the hardest technical problems

• Catch risk early: run the weekly account health review for your team and make sure every at-risk account has a plan and an owner

• Support presales by staffing specialist requests from Solutions Architects and running clean handoffs at close

• Turn field experience into pipeline: tales from the field, advanced webinars on real-world implementations, blog posts, case studies and events

• Feed the field back to Product, ranking product gaps by the revenue that depends on them

Requirements

• Several years of programming experience. You could build and deploy a production server from scratch, and you can debug customer integrations yourself

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

• 4+ years in technical customer-facing roles, such as forward deployed, customer or solutions engineering, technical consulting or software engineering with customer ownership, including experience leading or mentoring engineers

• A track record of driving adoption, retention or expansion on technical accounts

• Clear communication with CTOs, engineering leads and executives

• Willingness to travel as needed for customer engagements

You might excel if you...

• Have been a first-line manager of forward deployed, customer or solutions engineers at an API, developer-tools, AI or modern database company

• Have built with LLMs, RAG or agents and can talk credibly about retrieval and search quality

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

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

This is an in-person opportunity in New York. 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.