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Exa is building a search engine for the AI era, having raised $250M in Series C funding (led by a16z, with Benchmark, Lightspeed, and YC participating) at a $2.2B valuation. The company powers AI agents, Fortune 500s, and AI labs with its Search API, disrupting an industry unchanged since the 1990s. The ~100-person team is based primarily in San Francisco and includes talent from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, and founder backgrounds.
You will serve as Director of Communications, building the public voice of Exa's founders and leadership. This is a people-focused role: in the AI space, audiences follow people, and your primary job is developing genuine points of view with executives, articulating them in their authentic voice, and placing them where key audiences will encounter them.
Ghostwriting is central to this role. You will produce essays, posts, op-eds, and talk narratives on a fast cadence, covering technically substantive topics in AI and search infrastructure. You own the executive and founder brand—developing their public positioning, managing their editorial calendar, and measuring success by audience growth, engagement from target audiences, and the leaders' confidence that the words authentically represent them.
You will also own the speaking program: sourcing, evaluating, and securing conference, podcast, and panel placements; prepping and coaching speakers; and measuring success by placement quality and in-room performance. You manage media strategy and results, overseeing the current agency relationship while building in-house capabilities. You own launch coverage, reactive press, relationships with AI infrastructure reporters, and messaging discipline. You drive company social presence and editorial cadence, coordinating employee amplification of company channels.
Additionally, you own the narrative for major company moments—announcements, launches, milestones—ensuring coordinated public positioning and message discipline. You develop crisis and issues readiness: escalation paths, holding statements, spokesperson prep, and judgment about engagement timing. You use AI thoughtfully in research, drafting, and measurement while preserving human authenticity in public statements.
Success is measured by founders and executives having distinct, credible public voices with reliable output cadence; speaking placements strong enough to decline some; owned channels growing audiences of developers and buyers; press coverage reaching technical and enterprise audiences with factual accuracy; and consistent storytelling across all major company moments.
This role is based in-person at Exa's San Francisco headquarters. Proximity to founders and thought leaders is essential to the work.
