--- title: 'Principal Field Engineer, US Remote at Exa' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-field-engineer-us-remote-exa-remote-y8dn8njfk2ep' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-07' --- # Principal Field Engineer, US Remote at Exa - **Company:** Exa - **Location:** Remote - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-11-06 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-07 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/exa/ab53a8dd-ff37-459b-b834-be3b7a840d3d ## 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 Our Solutions Architects and Forward Deployed Engineers are aligned to accounts, segments and Account Executives. This role isn't. As a Principal Field Engineer, you work across the whole business: every region, every segment, presales and post-sales. Your job is to make Exa impossible to ignore for developers and technical buyers, and to make every Field Engineer better at showing what Exa can do. You'll build the demos, workshops and on-demand training the team and our customers use everywhere, take Exa on the road to conferences, meetups and user groups, and become the go-to expert the team pulls in when a deal or a customer needs someone who knows Exa inside out. You'll spend a lot of time where developers are, and a lot of time on a plane. This is not a slideware role. You are an engineer who builds, teaches and shows. In this role, you will: - Build the demos the whole team uses: flagship demos, sample apps, cookbooks and reference architectures that show Exa on real problems, and keep them current as the product ships - Design and deliver workshops, hands-on labs and technical webinars for prospects, customers and developer communities, and package them so any Field Engineer can run them - Create on-demand training content: video tutorials, self-paced courses and recorded labs that teach customers, developers and new Field Engineers how to build with Exa, without anyone in the room - Represent Exa at events: conference talks, booth demos, hackathons and partner events, in person, wherever the audience is - Start and run meetups and user groups in key cities, and grow a community of developers building with Exa - Be the team's subject-matter expert on Exa's products, search quality, evals and agent use cases; join key deals and customer escalations when SAs and FDEs need deeper help - Turn new launches into field-ready material: demos, talk tracks and competitive positioning, so the team can sell what Product ships on day one - Partner with Marketing on technical content, blog posts and events that generate pipeline - Bring what you hear back to Product: what developers try to build, where they get stuck, and what competitors are doing ## Requirements - Several years of hands-on programming experience. You can build polished demos and sample apps from scratch, fast, and you enjoy it - 4+ years in a technical customer-facing role (solutions architect, sales engineer, developer advocate or similar), ideally at an AI-native, API or developer-first company - A track record of teaching and presenting to technical audiences: talks, workshops, webinars, video tutorials or community events - Strong communication skills: you can hold a room of engineers, then explain the same thing simply to an executive - Self-directed: you can set your own priorities without a segment or a quota to tell you where to go - Willingness to travel up to 50% of the time, including internationally You might excel if you... - Have spoken at developer conferences, run a meetup, or built a community around a technical product - Have built with LLMs, RAG or agents and can talk credibly about retrieval and search quality - Have a following or a body of public work: open-source projects, technical blog posts, talks, videos - Love the moment a room full of developers sees a demo and gets it - Thrive in early-stage environments where your job description changes monthly - Care deeply about the problem of organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines This is a remote role based in the US, with travel to events, customers and our San Francisco HQ. 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, US Remote](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-architect-us-remote-exa-san-francisco-410py39fjtgf) — San Francisco, CA - [Solutions Architect, Sydney](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-architect-sydney-exa-sydney-try09d53aah0) — Sydney, Australia - [Solutions Architect, NYC](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-architect-nyc-exa-new-york-7vz7yf38mszq) — New York, NY - [Executive Assistant to Founders](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-to-founders-exa-san-francisco-aw8pw25a1zvd) — San Francisco, CA - [Head of Solutions Architecture](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-solutions-architecture-exa-san-francisco-q6z0f9s0scr9) — San Francisco, CA - [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