Head of Field Engineering

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 build and lead Field Engineering in EMEA from our London office. In EMEA you'll lead both motions: Solutions Architects, who win new business in presales, and Forward Deployed Engineers, who get customers to production and grow them after the sale. You're measured on revenue: new business won and existing accounts retained and expanded across the region.

You'll be one of our first leaders in the region, so this is a player-coach role. You hold the same technical bar as the SAs and FDEs you'll hire, and you'll be hands-on in deals and customer integrations while you build the team.

In this role, you will:

• Build Field Engineering in EMEA: hire, onboard and lead SAs and FDEs, and split into dedicated SA and FDE leaders as the team grows

• Own the technical win on new business in EMEA, in partnership with the regional Sales leaders

• Own post-sales technical success: onboarding to production, adoption, consumption growth, and early detection of churn and contraction risk on EMEA accounts

• Stay hands-on: run discovery, demos, POCs and competitive evaluations on key deals, and step into critical customer integrations

• Generate pipeline with Marketing in EMEA: webinars, technical content, events and meetups

• Run the global operating model locally: SA to FDE handoffs, account health reviews, escalation paths, and the product feedback loop

• Represent EMEA customers in product and roadmap conversations, ranking gaps by the revenue that depends on them

Requirements

• A hands-on engineering background: you can build demos, review production integrations and run rigorous evals yourself, at the same technical level as the team you'll hire

• 6+ years in technical customer-facing roles, such as solutions architecture, sales engineering, technical consulting or forward deployed engineering, including 2+ years leading teams, ideally at an AI-native or developer-first company

• A track record of winning technical evaluations, and experience getting customers live after the sale

• A track record of building a team or a region from an early stage

• Clear communication with CTOs, engineers and executives across EMEA markets

• Willingness to travel across EMEA and to our San Francisco HQ

You might excel if you...

• Have opened or scaled a new region for a US-based technology company

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

• Have owned or co-owned a revenue number as a technical leader

• Speak one or more additional European languages

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

This is an in-person opportunity in London.

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.