---
title: 'Commercial Counsel at Exa'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/commercial-counsel-exa-new-york-5vqeqd0ynmj0'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Commercial Counsel at Exa

- **Company:** Exa
- **Location:** New York, NY / San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-09-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/exa/028983fc-4344-4203-a8a8-51dac6d3a3be

## Job description

## About Exa

We raised a $250M Series C to build the search engine for AIs. Led by a16z, with existing investors Benchmark, Lightspeed, and YC doubling down, the round brings Exa's valuation to $2.2 billion. Exa is building a search engine for the AI era. Our Search API currently powers Agents, Fortune 500s, and AI labs as we transform an industry that hasn't been disrupted since the 90s. We're a team of ~100 from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, ex-founders, and dropouts alike. We are rapidly building the most intelligent search engine in history. We're high agency, low-ego, and united by the feeling that this is one of the last problems worth getting right.

## About the Role

You will be an early legal hire and help scale a world class legal function at a leading AI company. In this role, you'll partner closely with GTM and other teams to negotiate and close enterprise customer deals, focusing on the East Coast and EMEA and APJ regions. You’ll also handle a range of other commercial work, including data licensing and procurement. As an early legal hire, you’ll also help shape the templates, playbooks, and processes that form the company’s legal foundation. You’ll also provide substantial support in other areas, including compliance, data privacy, and legal operations.

For this role, we expect the ability to work from our San Francisco or New York offices 5 days a week, though we encourage you to apply even if you might need some flexibility for a period of time.

Responsibilites:

- Draft, review, and negotiate complex commercial agreements, including customer, data licensing, and vendor contracts
- Partner closely with GTM and other teams to enable deal velocity and provide practical legal guidance
- Help build and scale the legal infrastructure, including contract templates, playbooks, and processes
- Provide guidance on compliance, data privacy, and legal operations

What you bring:

- A law degree (JD, LLB, or equivalent) and meet the local licensing requirements to work as in-house counsel where you'll be based
- At least 3-5 years of legal experience, with substantial commercial legal experience in EMEA and APJ
- Experience working effectively across time zones, particularly with teams in EMEA and APJ
- Experience building processes and systems from the ground up
- Experience leveraging AI tools in your daily work
- Excellent communication skills and ability to translate legal advice for cross-functional teams
- Embody our values of humility, urgency, and agency
- A self-starter who thrives in a fast-paced, small-team environment

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)

## Other roles at Exa

- [Head of Marketing, EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-marketing-emea-exa-london-r1wesh1f9grz) — London, United Kingdom
- [Head of Marketing, APJ](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-marketing-apj-exa-sydney-m3w853zymbc2) — Sydney, Australia
- [Research Engineer, Index Intelligence](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-index-intelligence-exa-san-francisco-0sevzamm9cyp) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer, Content Understanding](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-content-understanding-exa-san-francisco-p9n8zfsw41qa) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Deployed Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-product-manager-exa-san-francisco-djdazyezqmta) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-exa-san-francisco-x0wsgbgdsrkj) — San Francisco, CA
- [IT Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/it-engineer-exa-san-francisco-ka6dsj9x2j45) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Talent](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-talent-exa-san-francisco-mzz16fvjp9xx) — San Francisco, CA
- [Manager, Sales Development - NYC](https://feeny.ai/job/manager-sales-development-nyc-exa-new-york-vbg3yt4nv3th) — New York, NY
- [Forward Deployed Engineer, Singapore](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-singapore-exa-singapore-3990n9bewza1) — Singapore