---
title: 'Business Operations at Exa'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-exa-san-francisco-9651svtrr72z'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Business Operations at Exa

- **Company:** Exa
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/exa/0e3957bf-3dd1-4a5a-828c-5c06a8499c93

## Job description

Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine unlike the world has ever seen. We build massive-scale infra to crawl the entire web, train state-of-the-art embedding models to process it, and design super high performant vector databases to retrieve over it. We now power search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and over 400,000 developers and have raised $350m from Lightspeed, Benchmark, and a16z.

Our ultimate goal is to build perfect search over all the world's information, far beyond Google. If you want to build massive-scale ML systems that will define the way the new AI world consumes information, this is the place for you.

Business Operations at Exa Exa is growing faster than the systems that run it. This is a generalist role for someone early in their career who wants real ownership of how a company operates — you'll work across finance, ops, and G&A, building the machinery that lets a small, dense team run a company serving 400,000+ developers. You'll go wherever the company is breaking, scope the problem, build the fix, and hand it off. And you'll do it AI-natively — we expect the person in this seat to replace manual work with agents and internal tooling rather than absorb it as headcount. How we operate is part of our advantage, not back-office overhead. You'll work directly with the founders and every function lead here. Most of what you'll own doesn't exist yet — you'll be the one who builds it.

## What you'll do

- Put AI to work inside Exa — Find work that people are doing and AI should be. Build AI workflows and internal tooling that eliminate manual steps across finance and ops, and become the person the team comes to for what's worth automating and how.
- Support FinOps and cost discipline — Help us understand and control what we spend. Track infrastructure and vendor costs, pull analysis that shows where the money is going, flag what looks off, and support the work to bring it down.
- Build the systems behind AP and AR — Own the day-to-day mechanics of money moving in and out: vendor onboarding and payments, customer invoicing, billing accuracy, collections follow-up, and expense workflows. Turn the parts that live in someone's inbox into processes that run on their own.
- Run cross-functional projects end to end — Take on the ambiguous work that doesn't belong to any one team and drive it from scoping to done.
- Support the people who own the numbers — Partner with finance and leadership on planning inputs, budget-vs-actual tracking, and the analysis behind decisions.
- Pick up what needs doing — This is an early team. Some of the highest-value work will be things nobody has written down yet.

## What you'll need

- 3-6 years of experience in investment banking, management consulting, accounting, strategic finance, or business operations at a high-growth technology company
- Genuinely AI-native — you already use LLMs and agents as leverage in your daily work and have built things with them.
- A builder's instinct for process — when something breaks twice, you redesign it. When a task takes four hours every week, you make it run itself
- Comfort with data — you can pull your own numbers, work confidently in spreadsheets, and don't need someone else to answer a question for you
- Extremely high attention to detail — this role touches money moving in and out of the company. Small errors are expensive
- High ownership and high tolerance for ambiguity — you take things from vague to done without being managed through it, and you're comfortable switching contexts several times a day
- Clear communication — you can write a crisp update, chase an overdue invoice professionally, and explain a process to someone who has no context

Exa is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related conditions, criminal histories consistent with applicable law, or any other basis protected by applicable law.

## About Exa

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Exa builds a web-scale search API and deep research engine purpose-built for AI agents and developers, organizing the web for the agentic era.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Will Bryk (CEO) and Jeff Wang (Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: AI search infrastructure, applied AI research, developer tools
- **Target customers**: B2B – developers, AI agent companies, enterprise teams (e.g., Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, Monday.com)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Organize all knowledge” and “reinvent how the world gets information” – building a search engine for the AI era that exceeds the quality and latency of traditional search.

## Products & Services
- **[Exa Search API](https://exa.ai/)**: A high‑throughput web search API delivering results in under 180ms, with support for low‑latency instant search, deep research, crawling, and structured output extraction. Includes “Highlights” (token‑efficient excerpts), company & people search, and code search. SOC 2 Type II certified, zero data retention option, single sign‑on.
- **Exa Embeddings & Neural Retrieval**: Proprietary state‑of‑the‑art embedding models trained on Exa’s own cluster of hundreds of H200s, achieving best‑in‑class accuracy on FRAMES, Tip‑of‑Tongue, and Seal0 benchmarks.
- **Custom AI Search Solution**: Enterprise‑grade search infrastructure that can be tailored for specific verticals and integrated via a single API.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: $2.2 billion (as of May 2026) – reported by Bloomberg and referenced on Exa’s about page.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $111.4 million (Pre‑Seed, Seed, Series A, Series B)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**:
  - **Investors**: Lightspeed Venture Partners (led Series A), Benchmark (led Series B), Nvidia, Y Combinator, and individual advisors such as Tal Broda (former VP of Compute, OpenAI) and researchers from Google/Bing.
  - **Customers & Integrations**: Cursor, Cognition (Devin), HubSpot, OpenRouter, Monday.com, and over 400,000 developers.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount: 75 employees (+127.7% YoY), with active hiring across 17 open roles.
  - Revenue: Not publicly disclosed, but traction with marquee customers and rapid valuation growth from ~$22M (Seed) to $2.2B in under two years.
  - Team distribution across 10 countries, with a strong engineering and research core (26% technical, 5% research).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Web‑scale infrastructure**: Crawls and indexes 500B+ webpages with a proprietary neural retrieval stack that improves predictably with compute.
- **Latency & accuracy leadership**: Fastest search API (<180ms) and top scores on industry benchmarks (FRAMES, Tip‑of‑Tongue, Seal0).
- **Agent‑native design**: Built specifically for the workflow of LLM agents – token‑efficient highlights, structured outputs, and low‑latency to deep research in a single API.
- **Enterprise trust**: SOC 2 Type II, zero data retention, SSO, and privacy controls.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Expand the search infrastructure for the coming “1000x more searches from AI agents than Google today.” Continue investing in end‑to‑end neural architectures, scale the cluster, and deepen integrations with leading AI platforms.
- **Direction**: Become the default “knowledge layer” for all AI agents, reinventing search from a link‑based model to a high‑quality, structured answer engine.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Applied AI research lab with a mission to build the world’s best search engine. In‑person team (San Francisco headquarters) with daily team meals, weekly milk tea, monthly picnics, and regular celebrations.
- **Remote/hybrid policy**: Fully in‑person for most roles, with flexibility for certain positions and visa‑relocation support.
- **Benefits**: Premium medical/dental/vision, monthly wellness and commuter benefit, fertility/family planning reimbursement (up to $15k lifetime), 16 weeks paid parental leave, daily lunch and dinner, snacks, and fresh bread from a local bakery.
- **Engineering culture**: Emphasis on research‑driven engineering – working on massive‑scale indexes, novel retrieval systems, and training state‑of‑the‑art models on Exa’s own H200 cluster.

## Sources
1. [Exa About Page](https://exa.ai/about)
2. [Exa Careers Page](https://exa.ai/careers)
3. [Exa Product Page](https://exa.ai/)
4. [Exa LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/exa-ai)
5. [Y Combinator Company Profile](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/exa)

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