Head of Talent

Exa • San Francisco, CA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

At Exa, we’re building a next-gen embeddings based search engine for AI. We’re a ~60-person team from places like Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Apple, and Palantir, backed by Benchmark, Lightspeed, and NVIDIA, and we’re scaling fast.
We’re looking for a Head of Talent to own and build Exa’s entire hiring engine.
You’ll work directly with our founders and CoS to build our early organization structure, out-compete companies like Anthropic and OpenAI for top research talent, and build our our people organization.
About the Role
The Head of Talent at Exa is both a strategic leader and a practical operator.This role sits at the center of Exa’s growth. The people you hire will define the company (and the future of search!).

Requirements

• 6+ years of recruiting or talent leadership experience in high-growth tech companies
• Experience hiring for both technical and GTM roles
• Proven ability to operate as both strategist and closer
• Strong opinions about hiring bar, team design, and talent quality
• Comfort working directly with founders in a fast-moving environment
• A builder mindset — you want to create systems, not just run them

Nice To Haves

• Experience at a top-tier startup or scale-up
• Experience building recruiting teams from scratch
• Technical literacy (you can comfortably talk to engineers and understand what makes them great)

Responsibilities

• Set Exa’s hiring roadmap with founders and CoS, and define what “great” looks like across teams
• Personally source, assess, and close high-impact hires, including senior engineers, GTM leaders, and early execs
• Run the most critical searches end-to-end when the stakes are high
• Design interview loops, scorecards, and hiring bar
• Build scalable recruiting workflows and infrastructure using Exa’s internal AI tools
• Hire, manage, and develop GTM and Technical Recruiters
• Build a culture of speed, ownership, and high bar across the recruiting team
• Shape how Exa is experienced by candidates and build a reputation that attracts elite talent

What This Job Offers

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