---
title: 'Head of Talent at Exa'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-talent-exa-san-francisco-mzz16fvjp9xx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-26'
---

# Head of Talent at Exa

- **Company:** Exa
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-26
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/exa/3804115b-24c5-4854-8bc6-6b6f0de85a1f

## Job description

## About Exa

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 ~150 from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, ex-founders & 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. We are looking for a Head of Talent Acquisition to lead recruiting through this next stage of growth.

## The role

The Head of Talent Acquisition will own Exa’s recruiting strategy, team, systems, and execution. You will lead a small talent acquisition team, build the function to support continued growth, and work closely with founders and hiring leaders across the company. This is a hands-on leadership role. You will develop the recruiting organization while remaining directly involved in senior, executive, and specialized technical searches. We are building complex systems, and solving technically difficult problems. We need the best humans to do this, all while building a culture of technical optimism, original thinking, and joy.

## What You'll Do

- 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 the most critical searches end-to-end when the stakes are high - executive searches and highly specialized roles.
- Partner with founders and hiring managers to define roles, interview loops, assess candidates, and close key hires.
- Set the bar - establish clear and consistent hiring standards across the company; define what great looks like across teams.
- Evaluate and build scalable recruiting operations to support our 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

## Who You Are

- 5+ years experience leading a talent acquisition function and managing/growing a team of recruiters.
- A strong record of hiring highly technical talent in areas such as infrastructure, research, web crawling, retrieval. You can comfortably talk to 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.

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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