---
title: 'Head of Support Engineering at Exa'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-support-engineering-exa-san-francisco-hj7gvyqy7n3a'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-31'
---

# Head of Support Engineering at Exa

- **Company:** Exa
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-31
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/exa/94f61fe3-e2be-4b5d-8d8c-fd8881297822

## 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 Support at Exa: an AI-first, 24/7 support function for every committed customer, worldwide. AI tools like Pylon and AI agents handle the first line; your team of Support Engineers takes on the hard technical problems the AI can't, with the same technical depth as our Forward Deployed Engineers. You'll also own escalation management: watching the health of every account, largely through AI, and making sure every contraction or churn risk reaches the right people with a clear plan to fix it. This is a technical leadership role. You hold the same technical bar as your team: you can debug a customer integration, read the code, and open a pull request yourself.

In this role, you will:

- Build the Support team: hire, onboard and lead Support Engineers across regions for 24/7, follow-the-sun coverage
- Build the support system: own our Pylon setup, ticket and SLA tracking, severity levels, automations and the end-of-shift handoffs, so the function runs as efficiently as possible
- Make the AI first line work: decide which tickets the AI resolves and which reach a human, and keep improving the share it resolves without a person
- Own escalations to Engineering: a clear path with full context, and customer follow-up owned by Support until resolution
- Own escalation management: monitor account health across regions, flag every contraction or churn risk to the account team and leadership with requested actions and owners, and follow it until resolved. Escalation management is a duty of your Support Engineers; add dedicated people only if the load requires it
- Partner with the account team (AEs, account managers, FDEs) on at-risk and strategic accounts
- Turn ticket patterns into product feedback, and drive fixes with Product and Engineering
- Report on support health: response and resolution times, customer satisfaction, AI resolution rate, and churn and contraction avoided

## Requirements

- Several years of hands-on programming experience, at the same level as the Support Engineers you'll hire: you can debug APIs and customer integrations and open pull requests yourself
- 5+ years in technical support, support engineering, SRE or customer engineering, including 2+ years leading a technical support team, ideally at an API, developer-tools or AI company
- Experience building support operations from scratch: tooling, SLAs, severity models, escalation paths and 24/7 coverage
- Strong judgment on automation and AI: you've used AI or automation to scale a support function without lowering quality
- Clear communication with customers, engineers and executives, especially under pressure

You might excel if you...

- Have built or rebuilt a support function at a fast-growing technical company
- Have run Pylon, or a similar support platform, at scale
- Have built with LLMs, RAG or agents
- 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

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- [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 Field Engineering, EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-field-engineering-emea-exa-london-x3nrwhqn1mwh) — London, United Kingdom
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