VP, Customer Experience

Job description

About Exa: Exa is building the search engine for AI — a web-scale retrieval and research API that gives LLMs and AI agents fast, cited access to the live web. Exa's customers span frontier AI labs, enterprises, and regulated industries like financial services, who rely on Exa as the information-discovery layer behind their products and internal tools. The role: We're hiring our first VP of Post-Sales to build and own everything that happens after a deal closes. You'll be responsible for turning new logos into durable, expanding accounts — designing how we onboard customers, instrumenting the signals that predict expansion or churn before they happen, running renewals, and overseeing support. You will own Net Dollar Retention (NDR) as your headline metric and build the team and systems required to move it in the right direction as we scale. This is a build role, not a maintain role: you'll be establishing the post-sales function's structure, tooling, and metrics from a relatively early stage, in a business with consumption-based revenue dynamics where usage — not just seat count — drives expansion. What you'll own - Onboarding: Design and run a customer onboarding motion that gets new accounts to first value fast, with clear milestones and handoff from Sales. - Health score & early-warning instrumentation: Build a usage- and engagement-based health scoring system that reliably flags expansion opportunities and contraction risk before renewal conversations happen — not after. - Renewals: Own the renewal process and forecast, partnering with Sales on commercial structure for upsell, cross-sell, and consumption growth. - Support: Oversee technical/customer support, setting the standards, tooling, and staffing model that keep response times and resolution quality high as volume grows. - Net Dollar Retention: Be the single owner and accountable executive for NDR — the metric that ties all of the above together — reporting on it regularly to the executive team and board. What we're looking for - 15+ years of industry experience in the technology sector, with meaningful time in post-sales, customer success, or account management leadership. - Prior VP-level (or equivalent) experience owning a post-sales or customer success organization at a B2B software or API company. - A demonstrated track record of owning and moving NDR, GRR, or net revenue retention at a company of relevant scale. - Experience building health-scoring, usage-instrumentation, or early-warning systems for churn/expansion — not just running renewal calls off a spreadsheet. - Comfort operating in a fast-moving, still-being-defined environment; you'll be building the playbook, not inheriting one. - Strong executive presence and cross-functional fluency — you'll partner closely with Sales, Product, and Engineering, and report directly to the CRO. Nice to have - Experience at an AI/ML company or with AI-native customers. - Experience with consumption- or usage-based pricing models (API, infrastructure, or similar metered products), as opposed to purely seat-based SaaS. Location & compensation Based in the Bay Area is preferred — we value in-person collaboration with the leadership team — but we're open to exceptional candidates working remotely within the US. Compensation includes a competitive base salary, meaningful equity, and benefits, commensurate with experience 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.