Head of Talent

The role

The Head of Talent Acquisition will own recruiting strategy, team, systems, and execution. You will lead a small talent acquisition team and remain directly involved in senior, executive, and specialized technical searches.

What you will do

• Develop and execute a recruiting strategy aligned with Exa's hiring plans including international expansion
• Lead, develop, and grow a recruiting team supporting research, engineering, go-to-market, and leadership hiring
• Run critical executive searches and highly specialized roles end-to-end
• Partner with founders and hiring managers to define roles, interview loops, assess candidates, and close key hires
• Establish clear and consistent hiring standards across the company
• Evaluate and build scalable recruiting operations leveraging Exa's internal AI tools
• Build a culture of speed, ownership, and high bar across the recruiting team
• Shape how Exa is experienced by candidates and build a reputation that attracts elite talent

Required qualifications

• 5+ years experience leading a talent acquisition function and managing/growing a team of recruiters
• Strong record of hiring highly technical talent in areas such as infrastructure, research, web crawling, retrieval
• Experience leading executive and senior leadership searches
• Proven ability to operate as both strategist and closer
• Experience building or improving recruiting systems in a high-growth company
• Comfort using data to evaluate recruiting performance and guide decisions
• Ability to balance long-term planning with hands-on execution for a global workforce

About the company

Exa is building a search engine for the AI era. The team is largely SF-based with approximately 150 members.