Forward Deployed Engineer, India

About Exa

Exa is building a search engine purpose-built for the artificial intelligence era. Recently raising a $250 million Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing backers including Benchmark, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator, Exa has reached a $2.2 billion valuation. The company's Search API currently powers autonomous agents, Fortune 500 enterprises, and AI research labs, reimagining an industry that has remained largely unchanged since the 1990s. Exa's team of approximately 100 people draws talent from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, as well as former founders and unconventional backgrounds, united by the conviction that building intelligent search infrastructure represents one of the defining challenges of our time.

About the Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer on Exa's Go-To-Market team, you will serve as the technical foundation for sales execution in the India region. Working alongside Account Executives, you own every phase of the technical sales cycle while helping establish how Exa enters and operates in your market rather than simply following an existing template. This is a foundational regional hire where you will shape processes, build capabilities, and directly influence how the company scales in India.

What you'll do

• Lead technical evaluations, solution design, demonstrations, and proof-of-concept projects that validate Exa's value to prospective customers alongside your sales partner

• Identify and develop expansion opportunities within existing accounts by recognizing adjacent use cases and initiating new technical evaluations

• Create custom demonstrations and prototypes using Exa's API, tailored to specific customer needs across applications like agents, research tools, search capabilities, and data enrichment

• Communicate Exa's technical capabilities through compelling narratives that resonate with engineering leaders, technical officers, and product managers

• Serve as the authoritative technical resource on Exa's product, API capabilities, and problem-solving approach, address complex technical questions candidly, run rigorous evaluations, and coordinate with engineering when needed

• Capture insights from customer interactions and evaluation patterns, synthesizing this intelligence for the product and engineering teams to inform future development

• Create reusable demonstrations, integration patterns, and sales playbooks that multiply effectiveness across the region while representing Exa at industry meetups, technical conferences, and community events

• Provide implementation support to early customers through onboarding and initial deployment while dedicated support infrastructure is being developed

What you'll bring

• Minimum five years of customer-facing technical experience, whether in solutions engineering, sales engineering, solutions architecture, or engineering roles with substantial customer interaction such as technical leadership or developer relations

• Working proficiency with APIs and modern development stacks using Python or TypeScript; you can design integrations, build functional demonstrations, debug issues in real time, and leverage AI-assisted development tools effectively

• Demonstrated ability to communicate clearly, present confidently to varied audiences, and acknowledge knowledge gaps with a commitment to finding answers

• Ability to thrive with incomplete information and rapidly changing priorities, managing multiple concurrent evaluations while focusing effort on deal-advancing activities

• Understanding of contemporary AI technologies including large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and autonomous agents, plus experience evaluating how customers assess such technologies

• Based in India with capacity to travel for customer meetings

Nice to have

• Direct experience owning technical evaluations at API-first or developer-focused platform companies, particularly proof-of-concept projects that progressed to customer deployment

• Background in leading engineering teams who wants greater customer exposure, or solutions engineering background seeking more hands-on technical work

• Personal projects or experience building with large language models demonstrating genuine AI interest

• Comfort with uncertainty and enthusiasm for establishing first processes in an emerging market

• Experience managing end-to-end enterprise evaluations including success metrics, security reviews, and responses to formal procurement requests

• Fluency in additional regional languages common across Asia-Pacific markets

What they offer

• Remote work opportunity based in India with international candidate sponsorship available

• Comprehensive healthcare coverage including medical, dental, and vision benefits

• Fertility benefits and monthly wellness stipend provided to all employees