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Head of Security

Exa· Engineering
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San Francisco, California$250k - $350kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Lead Exa's security program, strategy, and operations across products and company infrastructure to protect data, models, and systems in a scale-up AI/infrastructure environment.

Responsibilities

  • Define Exa’s company-wide security strategy, operating model, risk framework, and multiyear roadmap.
  • Establish Exa’s security posture and risk appetite in partnership with the founders and executive team.
  • Provide leadership with clear, decision-ready assessments of material risks, incidents, investments, and tradeoffs.
  • Own security architecture and engineering across Exa’s products, APIs, web-scale data pipelines, cloud environments, Kubernetes clusters, model-training systems, GPU infrastructure, and internal platforms.
  • Protect customer data, proprietary models, training data, source code, credentials, and other high-value assets from external attacks, insider threats, supply-chain compromise, and misuse.
  • Build security into the product-development lifecycle through threat modeling, architecture reviews, secure defaults, automated controls, vulnerability management, offensive testing, and engineering education.
  • Establish identity, access, secrets, key, certificate, and service-trust systems across human users, workloads, training jobs, and AI agents.
  • Build Exa’s detection, investigation, incident response, crisis management, and recovery capabilities; serve as the accountable leader during significant security incidents.
  • Own corporate security, including endpoints, SaaS applications, employee access, security awareness, insider risk, physical-security interfaces, and third-party risk.
  • Lead security governance, regulatory readiness, compliance, and customer assurance, including programs such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001.
  • Represent Exa’s security program in strategic customer conversations, enterprise reviews, audits, and other high-trust settings.
  • Define the security organization’s structure, budget, technology strategy, external partnerships, and hiring plan.
  • Recruit, develop, and lead an exceptional security team while creating a culture in which every team shares responsibility for security.
  • Establish meaningful security metrics and regularly communicate Exa’s posture, priorities, and progress to company leadership.

Qualifications

  • You have built or led security at a technically ambitious, rapidly growing infrastructure, AI, developer-platform, cloud, or enterprise-software company.
  • You have operated with company-wide accountability for security—not merely responsibility for an individual security discipline.
  • You combine executive judgment with deep technical credibility. You can move comfortably between company strategy, business risk, system architecture, incident investigation, and implementation details.
  • You approach unfamiliar problems with the mindset of both a builder and an attacker, and you are energized by security challenges for which no established playbook exists.

Benefits

  • premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision)
  • fertility benefits
  • monthly wellness stipend
Last updated Sep 2, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Exa

Web search rebuilt for LLMs

Exa is a search engine built for AIs. We enable developers to filter the internet's content with complex queries in order to bring the world's knowledge into their AI apps.

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