About the role

Aplyr's Quick Take

This role is for a hands-on engineer focused on building and improving storage systems that support xAI's AI infrastructure. You'll be designing features, addressing performance issues, and collaborating closely with a small team, making it an individual contributor position with some mentoring responsibilities.

Good fit

Ideal candidates have strong backgrounds in storage and database engineering, with experience in high-performance systems. A proactive attitude and excellent communication skills are essential for thriving in this fast-paced, flat-structured environment.

Worth noting

The salary range is quite broad, suggesting flexibility based on experience. The emphasis on a flat organizational structure may appeal to those who prefer less hierarchy but could be a challenge for those used to more defined roles.

ABOUT xAI

xAI’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 xAI’s advanced AI infrastructure into a platform used by around 600 million users every month. We’re building xAI’s 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 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.

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

Skills & Tags

rust ai ios data product design

Aplyr's read

xAI is reshaping AI-driven scheduling and meeting management, attracting talent in cloud infrastructure and legal expertise for its innovative solutions.
Synthesized from recent postings & public sources

What's promising

•xAI focuses on niche AI applications, enhancing productivity with automated scheduling.
•Recent hiring in cloud infrastructure suggests growth and investment in robust technology.
•Legal and commercial roles indicate a focus on compliance and strategic partnerships.

What to watch

•Limited public information about financial health and market performance.
•Potential over-reliance on a narrow product focus in a competitive AI landscape.
•The AI scheduling market faces stiff competition from larger, established players.

Why xAI

•xAI's specialization in meeting management automation sets it apart from broader AI firms.
•The company's focus on legal and compliance roles highlights a proactive approach to regulation.
•Hiring for diverse roles like BIM Manager and Commissioning Lead indicates a multidisciplinary approach.

Aplyr’s read is generated by AI from public sources. Was it useful?

About xAI

xAI

x.ai

View company

XAI (x.ai) is a technology company that specializes in artificial intelligence solutions, particularly focused on automating scheduling and meeting management.