Head of Support Engineering
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 2, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 29, 2026. Exa scores B on the Alion truth index.
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
You'll build and lead Support at Exa: an AI-first, 24/7 support function for every committed customer, worldwide. AI tools like Pylon and AI agents handle the first line; your team of Support Engineers takes on the hard technical problems the AI can't, with the same technical depth as our Forward Deployed Engineers.
You'll also own escalation management: watching the health of every account, largely through AI, and making sure every contraction or churn risk reaches the right people with a clear plan to fix it.
This is a technical leadership role. You hold the same technical bar as your team: you can debug a customer integration, read the code, and open a pull request yourself.
In this role, you will:
Build the Support team: hire, onboard and lead Support Engineers across regions for 24/7, follow-the-sun coverage
Build the support system: own our Pylon setup, ticket and SLA tracking, severity levels, automations and the end-of-shift handoffs, so the function runs as efficiently as possible
Make the AI first line work: decide which tickets the AI resolves and which reach a human, and keep improving the share it resolves without a person
Own escalations to Engineering: a clear path with full context, and customer follow-up owned by Support until resolution
Own escalation management: monitor account health across regions, flag every contraction or churn risk to the account team and leadership with requested actions and owners, and follow it until resolved. Escalation management is a duty of your Support Engineers; add dedicated people only if the load requires it
Partner with the account team (AEs, account managers, FDEs) on at-risk and strategic accounts
Turn ticket patterns into product feedback, and drive fixes with Product and Engineering
Report on support health: response and resolution times, customer satisfaction, AI resolution rate, and churn and contraction avoided
Requirements
Several years of hands-on programming experience, at the same level as the Support Engineers you'll hire: you can debug APIs and customer integrations and open pull requests yourself
5+ years in technical support, support engineering, SRE or customer engineering, including 2+ years leading a technical support team, ideally at an API, developer-tools or AI company
Experience building support operations from scratch: tooling, SLAs, severity models, escalation paths and 24/7 coverage
Strong judgment on automation and AI: you've used AI or automation to scale a support function without lowering quality
Clear communication with customers, engineers and executives, especially under pressure
You might excel if you...
Have built or rebuilt a support function at a fast-growing technical company
Have run Pylon, or a similar support platform, at scale
Have built with LLMs, RAG or agents
Care deeply about the problem of organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines
This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco 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.