{"id":3493674,"url":"https://alion.io/job/exa-head-of-support-engineering","title":"Head of Support Engineering","company":{"id":13137,"name":"Exa","domain":"exa.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/exa","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":19,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.474,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":81,"computed_at":"2026-11-03T05:54:40Z"}},"role":"Support","role_family":"Support","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":220000,"max":335000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":335000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Exa","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-29T23:23:18Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-29","last_verified_at":"2026-11-03T06:40:33Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"About Exa\nWe 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.\nExa 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.\nAbout the Role\nYou'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.\nYou'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.\nThis 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.\nIn this role, you will:\nBuild the Support team: hire, onboard and lead Support Engineers across regions for 24/7, follow-the-sun coverage\n\nBuild 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\n\nMake 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\n\nOwn escalations to Engineering: a clear path with full context, and customer follow-up owned by Support until resolution\n\nOwn 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\n\nPartner with the account team (AEs, account managers, FDEs) on at-risk and strategic accounts\n\nTurn ticket patterns into product feedback, and drive fixes with Product and Engineering\n\nReport on support health: response and resolution times, customer satisfaction, AI resolution rate, and churn and contraction avoided\n\nRequirements\nSeveral 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\n\n5+ 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\n\nExperience building support operations from scratch: tooling, SLAs, severity models, escalation paths and 24/7 coverage\n\nStrong judgment on automation and AI: you've used AI or automation to scale a support function without lowering quality\n\nClear communication with customers, engineers and executives, especially under pressure\n\nYou might excel if you...\nHave built or rebuilt a support function at a fast-growing technical company\n\nHave run Pylon, or a similar support platform, at scale\n\nHave built with LLMs, RAG or agents\n\nCare deeply about the problem of organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines\n\nThis 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.\nExa 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4326,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Marine & Ocean Engineering","Vector Search & RAG","AI Search","Web Scraping & Proxy Networks"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-30T00:41:50Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":4,"expected_fill_days":81,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-03T05:54:40Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":335000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/exa-head-of-support-engineering","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/exa-head-of-support-engineering.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-03T09:15:17Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":13241,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-04T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":13137},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=13137"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fexa-head-of-support-engineering"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fexa-head-of-support-engineering"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fexa-head-of-support-engineering"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/exa-head-of-support-engineering\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fexa-head-of-support-engineering"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3493674}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"exa.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3493674},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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