Exa

FDE Lead, NYC

New York City. Posted 16 days ago

The role

You will lead a team of Forward Deployed Engineers covering US East. You will manage customer onboarding, production adoption, and account expansion while remaining hands-on with technical debugging and architecture reviews.

What you will do

  • Lead and grow the US East FDE team in New York through hiring, onboarding, coaching and performance
  • Own outcomes on team accounts including onboarding, adoption, consumption growth, retention and expansion
  • Drive key metrics including retention and expansion revenue, time to production, consumption growth, and churn avoided
  • Join critical onboardings and escalations and review integrations
  • Run weekly account health reviews to manage at-risk accounts
  • Support presales by staffing specialist requests and running handoffs at close
  • Turn field experience into pipeline through webinars, blog posts, case studies and events
  • Feed field feedback to Product by ranking product gaps by revenue

Required qualifications

  • Several years of programming experience
  • Ability to build and deploy a production server from scratch
  • Ability to debug customer integrations
  • Experience working inside real codebases and production systems
  • 4+ years in technical customer-facing roles such as forward deployed, customer or solutions engineering, technical consulting or software engineering with customer ownership
  • Experience leading or mentoring engineers
  • A track record of driving adoption, retention or expansion on technical accounts
  • Clear communication with CTOs, engineering leads and executives
  • Willingness to travel as needed for customer engagements

Nice to have

  • First-line manager of forward deployed, customer or solutions engineers at an API, developer-tools, AI or modern database company
  • Built with LLMs, RAG or agents
  • Can talk credibly about retrieval and search quality
  • Thrive in early-stage environments where your job description changes monthly
  • 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.