Business Operations

Exa; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Exa is seeking a Business Operations generalist in San Francisco to own cross-functional processes across finance, ops, and G&A. You will embed AI in workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and partner with founders and function leads to build scalable infrastructure for a fast-growing company serving 400,000+ developers.

You should have 3-6 years of experience in finance, operations, or strategic business roles at high-growth tech firms and be highly data-driven, detail-oriented, and capable of

Qualifications

• 3-6 years of experience in finance, ops, or business operations at a high-growth tech company.
• Genuinely AI-native — you already use LLMs and agents in daily work.
• Builder's instinct for process — redesigns when something breaks, automates repetitive tasks.
• Comfort with data — pull numbers, work in spreadsheets, self-serve analysis.
• Extremely high attention to detail — sensitive to money moving in/out.
• High ownership and tolerance for ambiguity — deliver from vague to done without micromanagement.
• Clear communication — write updates, chase invoices, explain processes.

Responsibilities

• Put AI to work inside Exa — build AI workflows and internal tooling to reduce manual steps across finance and ops.
• Support FinOps and cost discipline — track costs, analyze spend, flag anomalies, drive reductions.
• Build the systems behind AP and AR — manage onboarding, invoicing, billing, collections, and expense workflows.
• Run cross-functional projects end to end — own ambiguous work from scoping to completion.
• Support the people who own the numbers — partner with finance on planning inputs and variance analysis.
• Pick up what needs doing — be an early team member responsible for undefined work.

Skills

AI-native

Data analysis

Attention to detail

Ownership

Communication

Cross-functional work

Job description

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.

Business Operations at Exa

Exa is growing faster than the systems that run it. This is a generalist role for someone early in their career who wants real ownership of how a company operates — you'll work across finance, ops, and G&A, building the machinery that lets a small, dense team run a company serving 400,000+ developers.

You'll go wherever the company is breaking, scope the problem, build the fix, and hand it off. And you'll do it AI-natively — we expect the person in this seat to replace manual work with agents and internal tooling rather than absorb it as headcount. How we operate is part of our advantage, not back-office overhead.

You'll work directly with the founders and every function lead here. Most of what you'll own doesn't exist yet — you'll be the one who builds it.

What you'll do

• Put AI to work inside Exa — Find work that people are doing and AI should be. Build AI workflows and internal tooling that eliminate manual steps across finance and ops, and become the person the team comes to for what's worth automating and how.

• Support FinOps and cost discipline — Help us understand and control what we spend. Track infrastructure and vendor costs, pull analysis that shows where the money is going, flag what looks off, and support the work to bring it down.

• Build the systems behind AP and AR — Own the day-to-day mechanics of money moving in and out: vendor onboarding and payments, customer invoicing, billing accuracy, collections follow-up, and expense workflows. Turn the parts that live in someone's inbox into processes that run on their own.

• Run cross-functional projects end to end — Take on the ambiguous work that doesn't belong to any one team and drive it from scoping to done.

• Support the people who own the numbers — Partner with finance and leadership on planning inputs, budget‑vs‑actual tracking, and the analysis behind decisions.

• Pick up what needs doing — This is an early team. Some of the highest-value work will be things nobody has written down yet.

What you'll need

• 3-6 years of experience in investment banking, management consulting, accounting, strategic finance, or business operations at a high-growth technology company

• Genuinely AI-native — you already use LLMs and agents as leverage in your daily work and have built things with them.

• A builder's instinct for process — when something breaks twice, you redesign it. When a task takes four hours every week, you make it run itself

• Comfort with data — you can pull your own numbers, work confidently in spreadsheets, and don't need someone else to answer a question for you

• Extremely high attention to detail — this role touches money moving in and out of the company. Small errors are expensive

• High ownership and high tolerance for ambiguity — you take things from vague to done without being managed through it, and you're comfortable switching contexts several times a day

• Clear communication — you can write a crisp update, chase an overdue invoice professionally, and explain a process to someone who has no context

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.