Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine unlike the world has ever seen. We build massive-scale infra to crawl the entire web, train state-of-the-art embedding models to process it, and design super high performant vector databases to retrieve over it. We now power search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and over 400,000 developers and have raised $350m from Lightspeed, Benchmark, and a16z.
Our ultimate goal is to build perfect search over all the world's information, far beyond Google. If you want to build massive-scale ML systems that will define the way the new AI world consumes information, this is the place for you.
Now, we’re looking for a Technical Sourcer to help build our Exa family!
About the Role
As a Technical Sourcer at Exa, you’ll work directly with the founders and leadership team to scale our company. This isn’t a standard recruiting job—you’ll be recruiting in the age of AI, using in-house agentic systems built on top of our own search engine to supercharge the process. You’ll not only help build our early, world-class engineering team, you'll also help design our recruiting processes.
What You’ll Do
Build Exa's sourcing function from scratch, outbound sequencing, messaging, and intro calls across channels like LinkedIn, email, and community platforms
Write cold outreach that actually converts, you know how to craft a message that gets a response from someone who wasn't looking
Use Exa's own search tools and agentic workflows to find and enrich candidate lists in ways competitors can't
Experiment with non-obvious sourcing channels, GitHub, conference attendee lists, Discord communities, research publications
Partner with founders and engineering leaders to deeply understand the profiles we're hiring for
Build and iterate on recruiting systems and workflows, not just run them
Who You Are
3+ years sourcing or recruiting for engineering and research roles at a startup or high-growth company
You've sourced passive candidates before and know the difference between a response and a reply
Strong written communicator, you can tell a compelling story in only a few sentences
Comfortable with ambiguity and building without a playbook
Curious about AI tools and willing to use Exa's own products as part of your workflow
SF startup familiarity, you know who the top engineers are and where they hang out
We are open to sponsoring international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3). In addition to premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision), we also offer fertility benefits and a monthly wellness stipend to all of our employees.
Exa is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related conditions, criminal histories consistent with applicable law, or any other basis protected by applicable law.
Skills Required
- 3+ years sourcing or recruiting for engineering and research roles at a startup or high-growth company
- Experience sourcing passive candidates and converting outreach into replies
- Proven ability to write concise, compelling cold outreach messages
- Experience using outreach channels such as LinkedIn, email, GitHub, Discord, and community platforms
- Comfortable with ambiguity and building recruiting processes from scratch
- Curiosity about AI tools and willingness to use Exa's products in workflow
- Familiarity with SF startup ecosystem and knowledge of where top engineers congregate
What We Do
Exa was built with a simple goal — to organize all knowledge. After several years of heads-down research, we developed novel representation learning techniques and crawling infrastructure so that LLMs can intelligently find relevant information.
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