SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
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 largely in SF and includes talent from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, and founder backgrounds.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the technical tip of the spear in GTM. Partnered with an Account Executive, you own the technical win across the entire sales cycle: running discovery with customer engineering teams, designing solutions on Exa's API, building and delivering demos and POCs that prove value, and converting technical evaluations into closed deals. As one of the first GTM engineers in your region, you will help define how Exa sells there rather than simply executing an existing playbook.
Key responsibilities:
- Own the technical side of the sales cycle: discovery, solution design, demos, POCs/POVs, and technical objection handling in partnership with your AE
- Run the technical side of expansion by identifying new use cases in existing accounts and turning them into evaluations
- Build working demos and prototypes on Exa's API tailored to each customer's use case (agents, research, search, enrichment)
- Translate Exa's capabilities into use-case narratives that resonate with CTOs, engineers, and PMs
- Serve as the trusted technical advisor: know Exa's product, API, and problem-solving capabilities inside out; answer hard questions honestly; run evaluations rigorously; know when to escalate to engineering
- Feed customer insights back into product: identify patterns across evaluations and channel them to product and engineering teams
- Scale yourself and the region by building reusable demos, integration patterns, and playbooks; represent Exa at technical workshops, meetups, and conferences
- Support early customers through onboarding and initial implementation as a founding regional hire while post-sales infrastructure is built out
The role offers premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision), fertility benefits, and a monthly wellness stipend. International candidate sponsorship is available.
Requirements:
- 5+ years in a customer-facing technical role (flexible for exceptional candidates): solutions/sales engineering, solutions architecture, or engineering roles with heavy customer exposure (e.g., engineering lead, developer relations, technical consulting)
- Technical depth with APIs and modern development (Python or TypeScript): ability to design an integration, build a working demo, and debug it live; AI-assisted tooling is expected and standard
- Strong communication and presentation skills: command a room, adapt to audience, and comfortably say "I don't know — I'll find out"
- Comfort with ambiguity and early-stage intensity: run multiple evaluations in parallel, prioritize deal-moving activities, and adapt as the region grows
- Familiarity with the modern AI stack (LLMs, RAG, agents) and how customers evaluate it; ability to scope a POC with clear success criteria
- Based in region with willingness to travel for customer engagements
Desirable experience:
- Owned technical evaluations at a developer-platform or API-first company with POCs/POVs that resulted in customer go-live
- Led engineers and want to move toward the customer, or are an SE seeking more hands-on work
- Genuine curiosity about AI and hands-on experience building with LLMs (side projects count)
- Energized by being first: first hire, first deal, first playbook in a region
- Run enterprise evaluations end-to-end (POC success criteria, security questionnaires, RFP responses)
- Speak additional regional languages (plus for APJ markets)
