xAI

Software Engineer - Real-Time Storage

xAI · Palo Alto, CA
Palo Alto, CA $180K–$440K Posted 2026-09-04
Salary
$180K–$440K
Type
Full-time
Experience
7+ yr

SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge.  Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organization is for individuals who appreciate challenging themselves and thrive on curiosity. We operate with a flat organizational structure. All employees are expected to be hands-on and to contribute directly to the company’s mission. Leadership is given to those who show initiative and consistently deliver excellence. Work ethic and strong prioritization skills are important. All employees are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.

ABOUT THE ROLE:

We’re looking for exceptional storage & database engineers who want to join us on a new project to deeply integrate SpaceXAI's advanced AI infrastructure into a platform used by around 600 million users every month. We’re building a new storage tier that powers training, inference, recommendations, and real-time data extraction.

We build and operate:

  • An exabyte-scale S3-compatible object store
  • A multi-tenant transactional key/value store that serves 100s of millions requests per second
  • A caching tier that serves billions of requests per second
  • A scalable vector database that powers our recommendation systems
  • A few other specialized databases serving hundreds of millions requests per second

RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Design, build, and launch to production new features and improvements aimed at unifying common components across the storage systems
  • Dive into performance issues and work with customers and deliver solutions to cater to customers’ latency, availability and data durability requirements.
  • Lead and drive incident responses and recovery with your peers. Review and contribute to incident postmortems and hold a high bar for the same.
  • Work in a collaborative environment and uplevel your peers by doing mentoring, code and design reviews.
  • Be open to develop new skills and learn on the job as we navigate new technology spaces.
  • Ground your decisions with data and reasoning and adapt to new information to make informed choices.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

  • Have at least 7 years of experience in software development, plus 2+ years building storage systems or databases.
  • Obsessed with reliability, performance, and quality
  • Proficient in high performance C++, Rust, or JVM-based languages
  • Expertise in building, running, and operating scalable and resilient distributed systems

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:

$180,000 - $440,000 USD

Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at SpaceXAI, which also includes equity, comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage, access to a 401(k) retirement plan, short & long-term disability insurance, life insurance, and various other discounts and perks.

SpaceXAI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice .

RustC++
$110K — 10th pctl $265K — 90th pctl
This role’s midpoint $310K vs. market median $180K for Engineering roles
+70%
above median
Based on 24,000+ Engineering roles with disclosed salary ranges tracked on NewJob.
xAI

xAI

Artificial Intelligence · Series E+ · Palo Alto, USA

Stage & Valuation
Series E+ · $250B
Key Investors
Valor Equity Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital
Open roles on NewJob
Most hiring in
Engineering (52) · Operations (40) · Design (3)
xAI builds artificial intelligence models and tools to accelerate human scientific discovery and enhance reasoning capabilities. The company develops AI solutions including the Grok platform to understand complex topics and assist users in exploring information.
Artificial Intelligence AI Infrastructure Technology
O
Member of Technical Staff - Model Training
Palo Alto, CA
Operations
$180K–$600K
O
Member of Technical Staff - Post-Training and RL
Palo Alto, CA
Operations
$180K–$600K
O
Member of Technical Staff - Voice Model
Palo Alto, CA
Operations
$150K–$450K
See all 215+ roles at xAI →
L
Staff Software Engineer - Infrastructure Storage
Lambda San Francisco, CA Hybrid
Engineering
$349K–$465K
B
Software Engineer - Storage
Backblaze Remote - Argentina Remote
Engineering
P
Principal Software Engineer - Real-Time Voice
Parloa Berlin, Germany
Engineering
A
Mission Software Engineer - Undersea Reconnaissance & Strike
Anduril Industries Washington, DC
Engineering
$166K–$220K
See all Engineering roles →

Interested in this role?

Apply directly on the company site — no recruiter middleman, no account required.

Apply now →
Apply on company site