--- title: 'Technical Recruiter at Exa' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/technical-recruiter-exa-san-francisco-jvh88s87bfzn' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-05' --- # Technical Recruiter at Exa - **Company:** Exa - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-08-07 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/exa/a3a77458-67b6-4654-8727-1c1fddebad51 ## Job description Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine unlike the world has ever seen. We build massive-scale infra to crawl the entire web, train state-of-the-art embedding models to process it, and design super high performant vector databases to retrieve over it. We now power search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and over 400,000 developers and have raised $350m from Lightspeed, Benchmark, and a16z. Our ultimate goal is to build perfect search over all the world's information, far beyond Google. If you want to build massive-scale ML systems that will define the way the new AI world consumes information, this is the place for you. We’re looking for a Technical Recruiter to help build our Exa family! ## About the Role As a Technical Recruiter at Exa, you’ll work directly with the founders and leadership team to scale our company. This isn’t a standard recruiting job—you’ll be recruiting in the age of AI, using in-house agentic systems built on top of our own search engine to supercharge the process. You’ll not only help build our early, world-class technical team, but also design the recruiting systems that let us scale rapidly. If you understand the SF tech/startup ecosystem and can speak the language of engineers (bonus if you can code yourself), you’ll thrive here. ## What You’ll Do - Own the technical recruiting cycle end-to-end: sourcing, outreach, interviews, and closing - Represent Exa externally and convince top-tier engineers, researchers, and operators to join - Partner with founders and team leads to scope roles and identify high-leverage hires - Build and optimize recruiting systems and workflows using Exa’s in-house agentic search tools - Experiment with creative sourcing strategies to stand out in the competitive SF startup market - Help shape Exa’s talent brand and recruiting culture as we scale hyperspeed (1.5x+ headcount growth each quarter) Desired Experience - 2+ years of experience recruiting for technical roles in startups or high-growth tech companies - Familiarity with SF startup culture—you know how to identify and attract top 1% startup talent - Strong communication skills—you can tell a compelling story and sell a big vision - Technical literacy (bonus if you can code or have a technical background). You’re expected to communicate our ongoing engineering projects to technical candidates. - A builder mindset—you want to design recruiting systems, not just run them - Comfort in a fast-moving, high-growth startup environment We are open to sponsoring 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 - [Forward Deployed Engineer, APJ](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-apj-exa-singapore-3990n9bewza1) — Singapore - [Head of Security](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-security-exa-san-francisco-wke7n8zkf1h6) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer, Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-intern-exa-san-francisco-ffxan2b69wpr) — San Francisco, CA - [Business Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-exa-san-francisco-9651svtrr72z) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer, Security](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-security-exa-san-francisco-yfsxpwrebdsv) — San Francisco, CA - [Sales Development Representative, Sydney](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-sydney-exa-sydney-vvbk02yj3f7p) — Sydney, Australia - [Technical Enablement Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-enablement-manager-exa-san-francisco-g5s16s4chh7x) — San Francisco, CA - [Executive Assistant to Founders](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-to-founders-exa-san-francisco-aw8pw25a1zvd) — San Francisco, CA - [Forward Deployed Engineer, EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-emea-exa-london-90gjwgsbsasz) — London, United Kingdom - [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-exa-new-york-ejfk8tm74y05) — New York, NY