Support Engineer

EXA AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Premium healthcare benefits

Fertility benefits

Monthly wellness stipend

Job summary

EXA AI is hiring for an in-person Support Engineer in San Francisco to solve complex customer problems around our AI-first search API and SDKs. You will own escalations, reproduce issues, and collaborate with Engineering to ship fixes.

The role requires hands-on coding ability and comfort with AI tools in a fast-paced environment. You’ll work closely with customers to triage tickets, improve documentation, and ensure successful resolutions across time zones.

Qualifications

• Hands-on programming experience; read and debug unfamiliar code.
• Experience troubleshooting APIs/SDKs in production (search/RAG).
• Structured approach to ambiguous problems; form hypotheses and test.
• Ability to explain technical problems clearly to customers and engineers.
• Comfort working AI-first with AI tools and agents as part of daily workflow.
• Availability for shift work as part of a 24/7 follow-the-sun support model.
• Experience with distributed systems and data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Build the support system: configure our Pylon instance and set up robust ticket tracking, SLA tracking and automations.
• Resolve tickets the AI can't by troubleshooting APIs, SDKs and client integrations.
• Reproduce bugs and open pull requests for Engineering review.
• Escalate to Engineering with full context when you can't solve it alone.
• Own every customer follow-up on your tickets, including escalated ones, until resolved.
• Improve docs, knowledge base, and workflows to resolve more tickets automatically.
• Ensure smooth handoffs at shift changes with context on open tickets.
• Coordinate with Account Executives and Forward Deployed Engineers to flag account risks.
• Identify patterns in tickets and translate into product feedback.

Skills

Programming experience

API/SDK troubleshooting

LLMs/RAG knowledge

Structured problem solving

Clear communication

AI-first workflow

24/7 shift availability

Job description

ABOUT EXA

We raised a $250M Series C to build the search engine for AIs. Led by a16z, with existing investors Benchmark, Lightspeed, and YC doubling down, the round brings Exa's valuation to $2.2 billion.

Exa is building a search engine for the AI era. Our Search API currently powers Agents, Fortune 500s, and AI labs as we transform an industry that hasn't been disrupted since the 90s. We're a largely SF-based team of ~100 from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, ex-founders, and dropouts alike. We are rapidly building the most intelligent search engine in history. We're high agency, low-ego, and united by the feeling that this is one of the last problems worth getting right.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Support Engineers make sure every committed Exa customer gets their problem solved, fast, around the clock. We run support AI-first: AI tools like Pylon and agents triage tickets, answer them and resolve what they can. You take on what the AI can't: the hard, ambiguous technical problems that need a real engineer.

You'll have the same technical depth as our Forward Deployed Engineers. You'll dig into the API, SDKs and customers' integrations, reproduce bugs, and open pull requests with fixes for our engineers to review. When a problem truly needs Engineering, you elevate it with everything they need to act, and you stay the customer's point of contact until it's resolved. This is not a script-reading role. You are an engineer who owns the fix.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:

• Build the support system: configure our Pylon instance and set up robust ticket tracking, SLA tracking and automations that make the support function as efficient as possible


• Resolve the tickets the AI can't, troubleshooting across the API, SDKs and customer integrations


• Reproduce bugs and fix them, opening pull requests directly for Engineering to review


• Escalate to Engineering with full context when you can't solve it yourself: reproduction steps, logs, customer impact and what you've already ruled out


• Own every customer follow-up on your tickets, including escalated ones, until the issue is resolved


• Make the AI first line better by improving docs, the knowledge base and our Pylon and agent workflows, so more tickets resolve without a human


• Keep the follow-the-sun handoff tight: end each shift with an automated handoff that gives the next Support Engineer full context on open tickets


• Work with the account team (Account Executives, Forward Deployed Engineers), keeping them informed on tickets from their accounts and flagging account-level risk early


• Handle escalation management: watch account health signals, largely through AI, raise every contraction or churn risk to the account team and leadership with requested actions and owners, and follow it until resolved


• Spot patterns across tickets and turn them into product feedback and fixes

REQUIREMENTS

• Several years of hands-on programming experience. You can read and debug unfamiliar code, and you're comfortable opening pull requests in a production codebase


• Experience troubleshooting APIs, SDKs or distributed systems in production, ideally with search, retrieval, LLMs or data pipelines


• A structured approach to ambiguous problems: you ask the right questions, form hypotheses and test them


• Clear judgment on when to keep digging and when to escape, and the ability to explain a technical problem clearly to customers and engineers


• Comfort working AI-first, with AI tools and agents as part of your daily workflow


• Availability for shift work as part of a 24/7, follow-the-sun support model

YOU MIGHT EXCEL IF YOU...

• Have worked as a software engineer, support engineer, solutions engineer or site reliability engineer at a developer-tools, API or AI company


• Have built with LLMs, RAG or agents, and can reason about retrieval and search quality


• Have built automations or AI workflows that took repetitive work off a team


• Like being the person who finally figures out what's going on


• Care deeply about the problem of organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines

This an in-person opportunity in San Francisco. 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.