{"id":3444477,"url":"https://alion.io/job/exa-solutions-architect-sf","title":"Solutions Architect, SF","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":76,"computed_at":"2026-10-31T05:58:55Z"}},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"staff","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":165000,"max":325000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":325000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":2,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Exa","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-29T06:10:53Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-29","last_verified_at":"2026-10-31T13:46:24Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":2,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":2},"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.\nWe 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\nSolutions Architects are the technical tip of the spear in Exa's presales motion. From the first call to the technical win, you're the person who shows prospects what Exa can do and proves it works for their use case. You partner with Account Executives on new accounts and new opportunities, and you're measured on technical wins, POC conversion, and pipeline velocity.\nYou'll run discovery with engineers and executives, build demos that land, design and run workshops and proofs of concept, and make the technical case for Exa against alternatives. When a deal needs specialist depth, you pull in our Forward Deployed Engineers. When a deal closes, you hand the customer off to them with everything they need to get to production fast. This is not a demo-only role. You are an engineer who sells.\nIn this role, you will:\nLead the technical side of new opportunities alongside Account Executives, from first call through technical win\n\nRun discovery to understand a prospect's use case, architecture, data needs, and success criteria, and qualify where Exa fits\n\nBuild and deliver tailored demos, sample apps, and prototypes that show what Exa can do on the prospect's own problem\n\nDesign and run workshops and POCs with clear success criteria, timelines, and evaluation plans, then drive them to a decision\n\nWin technical evaluations by benchmarking Exa on quality, latency, and cost, and making a clear case against alternatives\n\nHandle technical objections and answer security, compliance, and architecture questions\n\nBring in Forward Deployed Engineers as specialists when a deal needs deeper expertise, and run a clean handoff to them after close\n\nFeed market signal back to Product: what prospects ask for, where we lose, and what would help us win\n\nBuild reusable presales assets such as demo environments, reference architectures, and evaluation playbooks\n\nRequirements\nSeveral years of hands-on programming experience. You can build compelling demos, implement POCs end to end, and design and run rigorous evals in head-to-head competitive scenarios\n\n2+ years of hands-on presales or technical sales experience, ideally at an AI-native or developer-first company. You've owned the technical side of deals, run discovery and demos with technical buyers, and helped carry opportunities to close\n\nStrong communication skills: you can adapt your pitch to CTOs, engineers, and PMs alike, and explain complex technology simply\n\nTrack record of high performance in demanding environments, whether that's a top CS program, a competitive sport, a startup, or something else entirely\n\nHigh tolerance for context-switching, ambiguity, and sustained intensity\n\nWillingness to travel as needed for customer meetings and workshops\n\nYou might excel if you...\nHave worked as a solutions architect, solutions engineer, or sales engineer at a developer-tools, API, or AI company\n\nHave built with LLMs, RAG, or agents and can talk credibly about retrieval and search quality\n\nHave helped close revenue or driven commercial outcomes at a previous company\n\nThrive in early-stage environments where your job description changes monthly\n\nLove the moment a prospect sees a demo and gets it\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":4683,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":2,"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":["Search Engines","Vector Search & RAG","AI Search","Web Scraping & Proxy Networks"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-29T06:52:39Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":1,"expected_fill_days":76,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-31T05:58:55Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":325000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/exa-solutions-architect-sf","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/exa-solutions-architect-sf.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-31T14:55:24Z","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":23233,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-01T00:00:00Z"}},"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-solutions-architect-sf"},{"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-solutions-architect-sf"},{"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-solutions-architect-sf"},{"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-solutions-architect-sf\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fexa-solutions-architect-sf"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3444477}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"exa.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3444477},"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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