Head of Solutions Architecture

The role

You will build and lead the Solutions Architecture team in San Francisco. You will own the technical side of presales including discovery, demos, workshops, POCs, and competitive evaluations.

What you will do

• Build the SA team in San Francisco by hiring the first Solutions Architects
• Own the technical win in partnership with Sales leadership
• Coach the team on discovery, demos, POCs and competitive evaluations
• Drive key metrics including revenue closed, pipeline generated, technical win rate, POC conversion and time to technical win
• Join strategic evaluations, review architectures and help the team win competitive bake-offs
• Drive pipeline generation with Marketing through webinars, technical content, demo apps, events and meetups
• Build the SA playbook including discovery guides, demo environments, reference architectures, evaluation playbooks and the SA to FDE handoff
• Feed the field back to Product by ranking product gaps

Required qualifications

• Several years of hands-on programming experience
• 5+ years in presales or technical sales
• Experience leading SA, solutions engineering or sales engineering teams
• A track record of hiring strong technical people
• Clear communication with CTOs, engineers and executives
• Strong working partnership with Sales leadership
• Comfort with ambiguity and building process from scratch

Nice to have

• Built an SA or SE team from the ground up at an API, developer-tools, AI or modern database company
• Built with LLMs, RAG or agents and can talk credibly about retrieval and search quality
• Owned or co-owned a revenue number as a technical leader
• Care deeply about the problem of organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines

Benefits

• Premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision)
• Fertility benefits
• Monthly wellness stipend

Before you apply

• We're happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3)

About the company

Exa is building a search engine for the AI era. The company is a largely SF-based team of ~100.