FDE Lead, NYC

Exa • New York, NY

11d • $250,000 - $315,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Exa is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineering Lead to lead its US East FDE team, based in the New York office. The team owns the post-sale customer experience: helping customers get into production quickly, making Exa a critical part of their technology stack, and growing accounts or expanding into new use cases. Success is measured by revenue outcomes, including retention and expansion across the team's accounts.

This is a player-coach role. The lead will manage and develop the team while maintaining the technical depth to debug customer integrations, review architectures, and step into the most important accounts. The role works in partnership with Account Executives, Solutions Architects, Product, and the Americas FDE Leader. This is an in-person opportunity in New York, and Exa is willing to sponsor international candidates.

Requirements

• Several years of programming experience, including the ability to build and deploy a production server from scratch and debug customer integrations.
• Experience working inside real codebases and production systems, ideally involving search, retrieval, LLMs, or data pipelines.
• At least 4 years in technical customer-facing roles, such as forward deployed engineering, customer or solutions engineering, technical consulting, or software engineering with customer ownership; experience leading or mentoring engineers is also required.
• A track record of driving adoption, retention, or expansion on technical accounts.
• Clear communication skills with CTOs, engineering leads, and executives.
• Willingness to travel as needed for customer engagements.

Nice To Haves

• Experience as a first-line manager of forward deployed, customer, or solutions engineers at an API, developer-tools, AI, or modern database company.
• Experience building with LLMs, RAG, or agents, and the ability to discuss retrieval and search quality credibly.
• Comfort thriving in early-stage environments where the job description changes frequently.
• Strong interest in organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the US East FDE team in New York, including hiring, onboarding, coaching, and performance management.
• Own customer account outcomes, including onboarding to production, adoption, consumption growth, retention, and expansion, in partnership with Account Executives.
• Drive and track team metrics weekly, including retention and expansion revenue, time to production, consumption growth, and churn and contraction avoided.
• Participate in critical onboardings and escalations, review integrations, and help resolve the team's most difficult technical problems.
• Run weekly account health reviews and ensure every at-risk account has a plan and an owner.
• Support presales by staffing specialist requests from Solutions Architects and ensuring clean handoffs at close.
• Turn field experience into pipeline through field stories, advanced webinars on real-world implementations, blog posts, case studies, and events.
• Provide field feedback to Product and rank product gaps according to the revenue that depends on them.

Benefits

• Premium medical, dental, and vision healthcare benefits.
• Fertility benefits.
• Monthly wellness stipend.
• International candidate sponsorship, including examples such as STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, and E3.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed