Several years of programming experience with the ability to build and deploy production servers.
Experience with real codebases and production systems, particularly in search, retrieval, LLMs, or data pipelines.
4+ years in technical customer-facing roles, including leadership or mentoring of engineers.
Proven track record in driving adoption, retention, or expansion on technical accounts.
Strong communication skills with CTOs, engineering leads, and executives.
Willingness to travel for customer engagements.
Responsibilities
Lead and grow the US East FDE team in New York, focusing on hiring and performance management.
Own outcomes for team accounts, ensuring successful onboarding and production adoption.
Drive key metrics such as retention revenue and time to production, tracked weekly.
Stay hands-on by participating in critical onboardings and resolving technical challenges.
Identify risks early through weekly account health reviews and develop action plans.
Support presales by coordinating with Solutions Architects and ensuring smooth handoffs.
Transform field experiences into valuable content like webinars and case studies.
Provide feedback to Product on gaps impacting revenue.
Benefits
Premium healthcare benefits including medical, dental, and vision.
Fertility benefits for employees.
Monthly wellness stipend for all employees.
Full Job Description
About the Role
You'll lead a team of Forward Deployed Engineers covering US East, based in our New York office. Your team owns what happens after the deal closes: getting customers to production fast, making Exa a load-bearing part of their stack, and growing the accounts and/or expanding into new use cases. You're measured on revenue: retention and expansion across your team's accounts.
This is a player-coach role. You'll lead the team and still carry the technical depth of a senior FDE: you debug customer integrations, review architectures and step into the most important accounts yourself.
In this role, you will:
Lead and grow the US East FDE team in New York: hiring, onboarding, coaching and performance
Own the outcomes on your team's accounts: onboarding to production, adoption, consumption growth, retention and expansion, in partnership with the Account Executives
Drive your team's key metrics: retention and expansion revenue, time to production, consumption growth, and churn and contraction avoided, tracked weekly with the Americas FDE Leader
Stay hands-on: join critical onboardings and escalations, review integrations and help the team solve the hardest technical problems
Catch risk early: run the weekly account health review for your team and make sure every at-risk account has a plan and an owner
Support presales by staffing specialist requests from Solutions Architects and running clean handoffs at close
Turn field experience into pipeline: tales from the field, advanced webinars on real-world implementations, blog posts, case studies and events
Feed the field back to Product, ranking product gaps by the revenue that depends on them
Requirements
Several years of programming experience. You could build and deploy a production server from scratch, and you can debug customer integrations yourself
Experience working inside real codebases and production systems, ideally with search, retrieval, LLMs or data pipelines
4+ years in technical customer-facing roles, such as forward deployed, customer or solutions engineering, technical consulting or software engineering with customer ownership, including experience leading or mentoring engineers
A track record of driving adoption, retention or expansion on technical accounts
Clear communication with CTOs, engineering leads and executives
Willingness to travel as needed for customer engagements
You might excel if you...
Have been a first-line manager of forward deployed, customer or solutions engineers 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
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 an in-person opportunity in New York. 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.
