xAI

Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure

xAI · Palo Alto, CA
Palo Alto, CA $150K–$400K Posted 2026-09-04
Salary
$150K–$400K
Type
Full-time
Experience
5+ 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:

As a backend engineer, you’ll design and build scalable, high-performance systems that power subscriptions infrastructure, new monetized products, user growth, and creator monetization. You’ll work on mission-critical infrastructure that processes millions of transactions, optimizes user acquisition and retention, and enables creators to earn a living through their content. This is a unique opportunity to make a large-scale revenue impact while creating products that users and businesses love.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Design and build large scale search infrastructure (real-time indexing, serving, and data pipelines) that handles massive write and query loads with strict latency and reliability requirements
  • Go deep into search internals (indexing, query execution, and relevance) and help shape the technical direction of the core search infrastructure
  • Operate production services end to end, including monitoring, debugging, incident response, and performance optimization
  • Lead and drive incident responses and recovery with your peers. Review and contribute to incident postmortems and hold a high bar for the same

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

  • 5+ years developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems  or experience with storage or hardware architecture.
  • Proficient in high performance Rust, C++  or JVM-based languages
  • Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies (Elasticsearch, Lucene, or similar) and an understanding of how they work and why
  • Experience with operating system internals, filesystems, networking, or database storage engines
  • Obsessed performance, reliability, scalability and quality
  • Ability to take full ownership of problems and learn whatever is needed to solve them
  • Comfortable moving quickly in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities and tight deadlines

PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

  • Contributions to open-source search or infrastructure projects

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

$150,000 - $400,000 USD

Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at xAI, 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 $275K vs. market median $180K for Engineering roles
+50%
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 →
A
Lead Software Test Infrastructure Engineer
ALTEN Technology USA Palo Alto, CA
Engineering
$135K–$155K
A
Mission Software Engineer - Undersea Reconnaissance & Strike
Anduril Industries Washington, DC
Engineering
$166K–$220K
A
Senior Software Engineer - Fuzzer
Antithesis Operations Vienna, Austria
Engineering
$160K–$200K
A
Senior Software Engineer - Orchestration Language Team
Apollo Graph United States Remote
Engineering
$165K–$195K
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