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Exa is a $2.2B-valued search engine platform built for the AI era, backed by a16z and other top-tier VCs. The company powers AI agents, Fortune 500 companies, and AI labs with its Search API, disrupting an industry unchanged since the 1990s.
Forward Deployed Engineers at Exa operate at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success. You'll embed directly with customer engineering teams to solve complex integration challenges and drive production wins. This role requires the ability to ship code in the morning and close deals in the afternoon—you are both an engineer who sells and a seller who ships.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the full customer lifecycle from initial outreach through production integration and deal closure
- Building and shipping demos, tutorials, and sample applications showcasing Exa's capabilities
- Debugging and resolving technical issues across the full stack (API behavior, frontend rendering, etc.)
- Identifying patterns in customer feedback and translating them into product improvements, shipping fixes when possible
- Conducting multiple sales and technical calls weekly, adapting your pitch for CTOs, engineers, and product managers
- Analyzing usage data and customer interactions to identify churn risk and drive expansion opportunities
You'll work in a high-agency, low-ego environment with ~100 team members from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, and other top organizations. The role demands constant context-switching across accounts, codebases, and industries, with willingness to travel for customer engagements.
Ideal candidates have several years of programming experience and a proven track record in demanding environments (top CS programs, competitive sports, startups). You should be comfortable with direct customer interaction, have high tolerance for ambiguity and intensity, and ideally have experience building end-to-end user-facing products, closing revenue, or thriving in early-stage settings.
