Forward Deployed Engineer, Exa
$130-275k
Offers equity and bonus
More information about location
Search infrastructure for AI
Be an early applicant
Search infrastructure for AI
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$130-275k
Offers equity and bonus
More information about location
101-200 employees
Company mission
To understand any query – no matter how complex – and filter the internet to exactly the knowledge required for that query.
Role
Who you are
- Several years of programming experience. You could build and deploy a production server from scratch
- 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 with direct customer interaction. You've sold something, supported someone, or otherwise held your own in high-stakes conversations
- High tolerance for context-switching, ambiguity, and sustained intensity
- Willingness to travel as needed for customer engagements
Desirable
- Have built and shipped user-facing products end to end
- Have closed revenue or driven commercial outcomes 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
What the job involves
- Forward Deployed Engineers are the technical tip of the spear at Exa. You sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success, turning complex integrations into production wins. You need to be someone who can ship code in the morning and close a deal in the afternoon
- You'll embed directly with customers' engineering teams to solve real problems with Exa's API. You'll context-switch constantly across accounts, codebases, and industries. When something breaks, you fix it. When a feature is missing, you build it. When a customer is stuck, you unblock them before they even ask. This is not a support role. You are an engineer who sells and a seller who ships
- Take a customer from first cold outbound to production integration to closed deal
- Build and ship demos, tutorials, and sample applications that show what Exa can do
- Debug and resolve technical issues across the full stack, from API behavior to frontend rendering
- Identify patterns in customer feedback and translate them into product improvements, shipping fixes yourself when possible
- Run many sales and technical calls each week, adapting your pitch to CTOs, engineers, and PMs alike
- Analyze usage data and customer interactions to spot churn risk early and drive expansion
Our take
The way we currently query AIs means that the models we rely on are themselves reliant on the quality of internet search tools. To answer this, Exa is building a tool that allows AI models to perform the equivalent of a web search, making the models more effective in their responses to our questions.
Exa’s embeddings-based search engine is free of “hallucinations” (those bizarre search query answers that AI sometimes brings back to users). Also, in the same way that LLMs complete sentences, its predictive technology does the same for search queries by providing the next probable link.
It's an alluring product for companies and individuals who want to accelerate their research answers. It's also one of a kind at present, which has led to several successful funding rounds which will help accelerate its product. If it maintains its current momentum, Exa could well be the AI search engine of the future.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
May 2026
$250m
SERIES C
Sep 2025
$85m
SERIES B
Total funding: $362.2m
Company HQ
Mission District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Will Bryk
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously a Software Engineer at Cresta, Intern at Zoox Inc and was the President of the Harvard Undergrad Robotics Club.
Jeffrey Wang
(Co-Founder)Previously a Member of South Park Commons and was a Software Engineer at Plaid.
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