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Exa is building a search engine for the AI era. The Search API powers AI agents, Fortune 500 companies, and AI labs, disrupting an industry unchanged since the 1990s. The company is a ~150-person team based largely in San Francisco, composed of talent from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, and experienced founders.
You will lead Exa's talent acquisition function as Head of Talent Acquisition, owning recruiting strategy, team, systems, and execution. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will develop the recruiting organization while remaining directly involved in senior, executive, and specialized technical searches. You will work closely with founders and hiring leaders across the company to build a culture of technical optimism, original thinking, and joy.
Key responsibilities include:
- Develop and execute a recruiting strategy aligned with Exa's hiring plans, including international expansion
- Lead, develop, and grow a recruiting team supporting research, engineering, go-to-market, and leadership hiring
- Run critical end-to-end searches for executive and highly specialized roles when stakes are high
- Partner with founders and hiring managers to define roles, interview loops, assess candidates, and close key hires
- Establish clear and consistent hiring standards across the company; define what excellence looks like across teams
- Evaluate and build scalable recruiting operations to support hypergrowth, leveraging Exa's internal AI tools
- Build a culture of speed, ownership, and high bar across the recruiting team
- Shape how Exa is experienced by candidates and build a reputation that attracts elite talent
Requirements:
- 5+ years of experience leading a talent acquisition function and managing/growing a team of recruiters
- Strong record of hiring highly technical talent in areas such as infrastructure, research, web crawling, and retrieval; ability to comfortably engage with engineers and understand what makes them great
- Experience leading executive and senior leadership searches
- Proven ability to operate as both strategist and closer
- Experience building or improving recruiting systems in a high-growth company
- Comfort using data to evaluate recruiting performance and guide decisions
- Ability to balance long-term planning with hands-on execution for a global workforce
