Head of Support Engineering

Exa•San Francisco, CA

7d•$220,000 - $335,000•Onsite

About The Position

Exa is building a search engine for the AI era. Its Search API serves agents, Fortune 500 companies, and AI labs. The company is a largely San Francisco-based team of approximately 100 people. The Head of Support Engineering will build and lead an AI-first, 24/7 support function for committed customers worldwide. AI tools and agents will handle first-line support, while Support Engineers address complex technical problems with technical depth comparable to Forward Deployed Engineers. The role also owns escalation management, monitoring account health and ensuring contraction or churn risks reach the appropriate people with clear action plans. This is a technical leadership role requiring the ability to debug customer integrations, read code, and open pull requests. The position is in person in San Francisco. Exa is willing to sponsor international candidates, including candidates on STEM OPT, OPT, H-1B, O-1, or E-3 visas.

Requirements

Several years of hands-on programming experience at the level expected of the Support Engineers they will hire, including the ability to debug APIs and customer integrations and open pull requests.
At least 5 years of experience in technical support, support engineering, SRE, or customer engineering.
At least 2 years of experience leading a technical support team.
Experience building support operations from scratch, including tooling, SLAs, severity models, escalation paths, and 24/7 coverage.
Strong judgment about automation and AI, with experience using AI or automation to scale support without reducing quality.
Clear communication with customers, engineers, and executives, especially under pressure.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or rebuilding a support function at a fast-growing technical company.
Experience running Pylon or a similar support platform at scale.
Experience building with LLMs, RAG, or agents.
Care deeply about organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines.
Experience at an API, developer-tools, or AI company is described as ideal.

Responsibilities

Hire, onboard, and lead Support Engineers across regions to provide 24/7 follow-the-sun coverage.
Own the support system, including Pylon setup, ticket and SLA tracking, severity levels, automations, and end-of-shift handoffs.
Determine which tickets the AI resolves and which are escalated to a human, and continuously increase the share resolved without human involvement.
Own escalations to Engineering by ensuring a clear path with full context and customer follow-up by Support through resolution.
Monitor account health across regions, flag contraction or churn risks to account teams and leadership with requested actions and owners, and follow risks through resolution.
Partner with account executives, account managers, and Forward Deployed Engineers on at-risk and strategic accounts.
Turn ticket patterns into product feedback and drive fixes with Product and Engineering.
Report on support health, including response and resolution times, customer satisfaction, AI resolution rate, and churn and contraction avoided.