---
title: 'Head of Solutions Architecture at Exa'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-solutions-architecture-exa-san-francisco-q6z0f9s0scr9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-31'
---

# Head of Solutions Architecture at Exa

- **Company:** Exa
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-30
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-31
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/exa/9ac50e4f-bf2d-4118-93c1-3a42d4e74b35

## 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 largely SF-based 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'll build and lead Exa's Solutions Architecture team, starting in San Francisco. Solutions Architects own the technical side of presales: discovery, demos, workshops, POCs and competitive evaluations that win new business. You'll hire the first SAs, set how the team works, and grow it as the business grows. You're measured on the new revenue your team helps close. This is a player-coach role. You hold the same technical bar as the people you hire: you can build a demo, run a competitive eval and review a POC architecture yourself, and you step into the most important deals when it matters.

In this role, you will:

- Build the SA team in San Francisco: hire the first Solutions Architects and keep the bar high as the team grows
- Own the technical win in partnership with Sales leadership, and coach the team on discovery, demos, POCs and competitive evaluations
- Drive the SA team's key metrics: revenue closed with the team, pipeline generated, technical win rate, POC conversion and time to technical win. Set the targets, track them weekly and coach the team to hit them
- Get hands-on in key deals: join strategic evaluations, review architectures and help the team win competitive bake-offs
- Drive pipeline generation with Marketing: webinars, technical content, demo apps, events and meetups that create new pipeline
- Build the SA playbook: discovery guides, demo environments, reference architectures, evaluation playbooks and the SA to FDE handoff
- Feed the field back to Product, ranking product gaps by the pipeline and revenue that depend on them

## Requirements

- Several years of hands-on programming experience, at the same level as the SAs you'll hire: you can build demos, implement POCs and run rigorous competitive evals yourself
- 5+ years in presales or technical sales, including experience leading SA, solutions engineering or sales engineering teams, ideally at an AI-native or developer-first company
- A track record of hiring strong technical people
- Clear communication with CTOs, engineers and executives, and a strong working partnership with Sales leadership
- Comfort with ambiguity and building process from scratch in a fast-growing company
- Willingness to travel as needed for customer meetings, events and team time

You might excel if you...

- Have built an SA or SE team from the ground up at an API, developer-tools, AI or modern database company
- Have built with LLMs, RAG or agents and can talk credibly about retrieval and search quality
- Have owned or co-owned a revenue number as a technical leader
- Care deeply about the problem of organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines

This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco. We're happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3). In addition to premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision), we also offer fertility benefits and a monthly wellness stipend to all of our employees. 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

- [Solutions Architect, EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-architect-emea-exa-london-mptw2etmy4f7) — London, United Kingdom
- [FDE Lead, NYC](https://feeny.ai/job/fde-lead-nyc-exa-new-york-pamhxm7rjx4b) — New York, NY
- [Support Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/support-engineer-exa-san-francisco-vfsdzk4b01p3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Support Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-support-engineering-exa-san-francisco-hj7gvyqy7n3a) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Field Engineering, EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-field-engineering-emea-exa-london-x3nrwhqn1mwh) — London, United Kingdom
- [Software Engineer, Web Crawling](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-web-crawling-exa-san-francisco-rz2fkjkzm52p) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer, Index Intelligence](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-index-intelligence-exa-zurich-b6dn4q54kd4q) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Research Engineer, Content Understanding](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-content-understanding-exa-zurich-r9pn2a3nz8cn) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Software Engineer, Knowledge Engine – Query Engine](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-knowledge-engine-query-engine-exa-zurich-878qt7c4g1n8) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Software Engineer, Security](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-security-exa-san-francisco-yfsxpwrebdsv) — San Francisco, CA