Exa Principal Field Engineer at Exa to build demos, workshops, and training for developers and customers. Act as a technical expert and represent Exa at events to drive adoption and support sales.
Responsibilities
Our Solutions Architects and Forward Deployed Engineers are aligned to accounts, segments and Account Executives. This role isn't. As a Principal Field Engineer, you work across the whole business: every region, every segment, presales and post-sales. Your job is to make Exa impossible to ignore for developers and technical buyers, and to make every Field Engineer better at showing what Exa can do.
You'll build the demos, workshops and on-demand training the team and our customers use everywhere, take Exa on the road to conferences, meetups and user groups, and become the go-to expert the team pulls in when a deal or a customer needs someone who knows Exa inside out. You'll spend a lot of time where developers are, and a lot of time on a plane. This is not a slideware role. You are an engineer who builds, teaches and shows.
Build the demos the whole team uses: flagship demos, sample apps, cookbooks and reference architectures that show Exa on real problems, and keep them current as the product ships
Design and deliver workshops, hands-on labs and technical webinars for prospects, customers and developer communities, and package them so any Field Engineer can run them
Create on-demand training content: video tutorials, self-paced courses and recorded labs that teach customers, developers and new Field Engineers how to build with Exa, without anyone in the room
Represent Exa at events: conference talks, booth demos, hackathons and partner events, in person, wherever the audience is
Start and run meetups and user groups in key cities, and grow a community of developers building with Exa
Be the team's subject-matter expert on Exa's products, search quality, evals and agent use cases; join key deals and customer escalations when SAs and FDEs need deeper help
Turn new launches into field-ready material: demos, talk tracks and competitive positioning, so the team can sell what Product ships on day one
Partner with Marketing on technical content, blog posts and events that generate pipeline
Bring what you hear back to Product: what developers try to build, where they get stuck, and what competitors are doing
Qualification
Strong communication skillsSelf-directedYou might excel if youHave spoken at developer conferencesHave built with LLMs
Required
Several years of hands-on programming experience. You can build polished demos and sample apps from scratch, fast, and you enjoy it
4+ years in a technical customer-facing role (solutions architect, sales engineer, developer advocate or similar), ideally at an AI-native, API or developer-first company
A track record of teaching and presenting to technical audiences: talks, workshops, webinars, video tutorials or community events
Strong communication skills: you can hold a room of engineers, then explain the same thing simply to an executive
Self-directed: you can set your own priorities without a segment or a quota to tell you where to go
Willingness to travel up to 50% of the time, including internationally
You might excel if you...
Have spoken at developer conferences, run a meetup, or built a community around a technical product
Have built with LLMs, RAG or agents and can talk credibly about retrieval and search quality
Have a following or a body of public work: open-source projects, technical blog posts, talks, videos
Love the moment a room full of developers sees a demo and gets it
Thrive in early-stage environments where your job description changes monthly
