E
Principal Field Engineer, US Remote
Contract type
Ongoing
Work mode
Remote
Experience
Mid-level · 4+ years
Job description
A Principal Field Engineer role at Exa, working across the whole business to build demos, workshops, training content and community events that show developers and technical buyers what Exa's search API can do. The role is engineering-heavy and involves significant travel to conferences, meetups and customers.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Remote
- Languages
- English
What you'll do
- Build the demos the whole team uses: flagship demos, sample apps, cookbooks and reference architectures that show Exa on real problems, and keep them current as the product ships
- Design and deliver workshops, hands-on labs and technical webinars for prospects, customers and developer communities, and package them so any Field Engineer can run them
- Create on-demand training content: video tutorials, self-paced courses and recorded labs that teach customers, developers and new Field Engineers how to build with Exa
- Represent Exa at events: conference talks, booth demos, hackathons and partner events, in person, wherever the audience is
- Start and run meetups and user groups in key cities, and grow a community of developers building with Exa
- Be the team's subject-matter expert on Exa's products, search quality, evals and agent use cases; join key deals and customer escalations when SAs and FDEs need deeper help
- Turn new launches into field-ready material: demos, talk tracks and competitive positioning, so the team can sell what Product ships on day one
- Partner with Marketing on technical content, blog posts and events that generate pipeline
- Bring what you hear back to Product: what developers try to build, where they get stuck, and what competitors are doing
What we're looking for
- Several years of hands-on programming experience; can build polished demos and sample apps from scratch, fast
- 4+ years in a technical customer-facing role (solutions architect, sales engineer, developer advocate or similar), ideally at an AI-native, API or developer-first company
- A track record of teaching and presenting to technical audiences: talks, workshops, webinars, video tutorials or community events
- Strong communication skills: can hold a room of engineers, then explain the same thing simply to an executive
- Self-directed: can set own priorities without a segment or a quota
- Willingness to travel up to 50% of the time, including internationally
Nice to have
- Have spoken at developer conferences, run a meetup, or built a community around a technical product
- Have built with LLMs, RAG or agents and can talk credibly about retrieval and search quality
- Have a following or a body of public work: open-source projects, technical blog posts, talks, videos
- Love the moment a room full of developers sees a demo and gets it
- 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
Apply
Direct apply at Exa
Opens the job posting at Exa
About Exa
The search engine for AIs
Exa is building a search engine for the AI era. Its Search API powers Agents, Fortune 500s, and AI labs. The team is largely SF-based, ~100 people from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, ex-founders, and dropouts alike.
Mission
Build the most intelligent search engine in history and organize the world's knowledge to make it accessible to machines
Key facts
- ~100
- San Francisco
- Raised a $250M Series C led by a16z, with Benchmark, Lightspeed, and YC participating
- Valuation of $2.2 billion
- Search API powers Agents, Fortune 500s, and AI labs
- Largely SF-based team of ~100
- High agency, low-ego culture
Partners & customers
a16zBenchmarkLightspeedYC
What they value
- High agency