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Exa is building a search engine for the AI era, having raised $250M Series C at a $2.2B valuation. The company's Search API powers AI agents, Fortune 500 companies, and AI labs, disrupting an industry unchanged since the 1990s. The team of ~100 includes talent from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, and successful founders.
Forward Deployed Engineers are technical specialists who operate at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success. This role combines hands-on software engineering with direct customer engagement—you'll ship code in the morning and close deals in the afternoon.
Key responsibilities include: embedding directly with customer engineering teams to solve production problems using Exa's API; building and shipping demos, tutorials, and sample applications; debugging and resolving technical issues across the full stack (API behavior, frontend rendering, integrations); identifying patterns in customer feedback and translating them into product improvements; running sales and technical calls with CTOs, engineers, and product managers; and analyzing usage data to spot churn risk and drive expansion opportunities.
This is not a support role. You are an engineer who sells and a seller who ships. You'll take customers from initial outreach through production integration to closed deals, context-switching 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 proactively.
Required qualifications: several years of programming experience with the ability to build and deploy production servers from scratch; track record of high performance in demanding environments (top CS program, competitive sport, startup, etc.); comfort with direct customer interaction and high-stakes conversations; high tolerance for context-switching, ambiguity, and sustained intensity; willingness to travel for customer engagements.
Ideal candidates have shipped end-to-end user-facing products, closed revenue or driven commercial outcomes at previous companies, thrive in early-stage environments with evolving responsibilities, and are energized by being the customer-facing face of Exa.
