Principal Field Engineer

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

Our Solutions Architects and Forward Deployed Engineers are aligned to accounts, segments and Account Executives. This role isn't. As a Principal Field Engineer, you work across the whole business: every region, every segment, presales and post-sales. Your job is to make Exa impossible to ignore for developers and technical buyers, and to make every Field Engineer better at showing what Exa can do.

You'll build the demos, workshops and on-demand training the team and our customers use everywhere, take Exa on the road to conferences, meetups and user groups, and become the go-to expert the team pulls in when a deal or a customer needs someone who knows Exa inside out. You'll spend a lot of time where developers are, and a lot of time on a plane. This is not a slideware role. You are an engineer who builds, teaches and shows.

In this role, you will:

• Build the demos the whole team uses: flagship demos, sample apps, cookbooks and reference architectures that show Exa on real problems, and keep them current as the product ships

• Design and deliver workshops, hands-on labs and technical webinars for prospects, customers and developer communities, and package them so any Field Engineer can run them

• Create on-demand training content: video tutorials, self-paced courses and recorded labs that teach customers, developers and new Field Engineers how to build with Exa, without anyone in the room

• Represent Exa at events: conference talks, booth demos, hackathons and partner events, in person, wherever the audience is

• Start and run meetups and user groups in key cities, and grow a community of developers building with Exa

• Be the team's subject-matter expert on Exa's products, search quality, evals and agent use cases; join key deals and customer escalations when SAs and FDEs need deeper help

• Turn new launches into field-ready material: demos, talk tracks and competitive positioning, so the team can sell what Product ships on day one

• Partner with Marketing on technical content, blog posts and events that generate pipeline

• Bring what you hear back to Product: what developers try to build, where they get stuck, and what competitors are doing
  

Requirements

• Several years of hands-on programming experience. You can build polished demos and sample apps from scratch, fast, and you enjoy it

• 4+ years in a technical customer-facing role (solutions architect, sales engineer, developer advocate or similar), ideally at an AI-native, API or developer-first company

• A track record of teaching and presenting to technical audiences: talks, workshops, webinars, video tutorials or community events

• Strong communication skills: you can hold a room of engineers, then explain the same thing simply to an executive

• Self-directed: you can set your own priorities without a segment or a quota to tell you where to go

• Willingness to travel up to 50% of the time, including internationally
  

You might excel if you...

• Have spoken at developer conferences, run a meetup, or built a community around a technical product

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

• Have a following or a body of public work: open-source projects, technical blog posts, talks, videos

• Love the moment a room full of developers sees a demo and gets it

• 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 a remote role based in the US, with travel to events, customers and our San Francisco HQ. 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.