xAI

Sr. Model Engineer, Mid-Training

xAI · Palo Alto, CA
Palo Alto, CA $180K–$440K Posted 2026-11-05
Salary
$180K–$440K
Type
Full-time
Experience
5+ yr

SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today, SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary and expanding consciousness to the stars.

SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe. Our teams are building the full Super Intelligence stack: from our Colossus supercomputers, to Grok models, to our suite of applications, including Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X. We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Scale synthetic coding data to trillions of tokens with large-scale docker verification
  • Distill the intelligence of flagship models into flash models through synthetic data generation
  • Optimize mid-training data mixtures to boost the ceiling for RL
  • Engineer long-context data recipes
  • Develop robust and diverse evaluation for mid-training checkpoints

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

  • Experience writing production-quality code in Python, PyTorch, JAX, Rust, or C++
  • Experience training large models (e.g., pre-training, post-training, fine-tuning, or RL training of neural networks with 1B+ parameters)

PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

  • Familiarity across all kinds of scaling laws
  • Strong ability to design ML experiments
  • Familiarity with state-of-the-art techniques for curating AI training data for text, image, audio, and video modalities
  • Strong engineering abilities in large-scale data processing frameworks
  • Experience with ML and large model scaling
  • Experience with Spark, Ray, and other large-scale data processing frameworks

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:

$180,000 - $440,000 USD

Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at SpaceXSI, 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.

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

PythonPyTorchRustSparkC++
$110K — 10th pctl $270K — 90th pctl
This role’s midpoint $310K vs. market median $180K for Engineering roles
+70%
above median
Based on 25,000+ 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
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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.
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