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Exa is an applied AI lab building a next-generation search engine powered by massive-scale infrastructure, state-of-the-art embedding models, and high-performance vector databases. The company powers search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and over 400,000 developers, with $350M in funding from Lightspeed, Benchmark, and a16z.
As Head of Security, you will define and own Exa's company-wide security strategy, operating model, risk framework, and multiyear roadmap. You'll establish the company's security posture and risk appetite in partnership with founders and the executive team, providing leadership with clear, decision-ready assessments of material risks, incidents, investments, and tradeoffs.
You will own security architecture and engineering across Exa's products, APIs, web-scale data pipelines, cloud environments, Kubernetes clusters, model-training systems, GPU infrastructure, and internal platforms. Your responsibilities include protecting customer data, proprietary models, training data, source code, credentials, and other high-value assets from external attacks, insider threats, supply-chain compromise, and misuse.
You'll build security into the product-development lifecycle through threat modeling, architecture reviews, secure defaults, automated controls, vulnerability management, offensive testing, and engineering education. You'll establish identity, access, secrets, key, certificate, and service-trust systems across human users, workloads, training jobs, and AI agents.
Additionally, you'll build detection, investigation, incident response, crisis management, and recovery capabilities, serving as the accountable leader during significant security incidents. You'll own corporate security including endpoints, SaaS applications, employee access, security awareness, insider risk, and third-party risk management. You'll lead security governance, regulatory readiness, compliance, and customer assurance programs such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001.
You'll represent Exa's security program in strategic customer conversations, enterprise reviews, and audits. You'll define the security organization's structure, budget, technology strategy, external partnerships, and hiring plan. Finally, you'll recruit, develop, and lead an exceptional security team while creating a culture in which every team shares responsibility for security, and establish meaningful security metrics to communicate Exa's posture and progress to company leadership.
