Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure at xAI

<div class="content-intro"><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organization is for individuals who appreciate challenging themselves and thrive on curiosity. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">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. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">All employees are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.</span></p></div><h3 data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ABOUT THE ROLE:</span></h3> <p>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.</p> <h3><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">RESPONSIBILITIES:</span></h3> <ul> <li>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</li> <li>Go deep into search internals (indexing, query execution, and relevance) and help shape the technical direction of the core search infrastructure</li> <li>Operate production services end to end, including monitoring, debugging, incident response, and performance optimization</li> <li>Lead and drive incident responses and recovery with your peers. Review and contribute to incident postmortems and hold a high bar for the same</li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:</span></h3> <ul> <li>5+ years developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems&nbsp; or experience with storage or hardware architecture.</li> <li>Proficient in high performance Rust, C++&nbsp; or JVM-based languages</li> <li>Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies (Elasticsearch, Lucene, or similar) and an understanding of how they work and why</li> <li>Experience with operating system internals, filesystems, networking, or database storage engines</li> <li>Obsessed performance, reliability, scalability and quality</li> <li>Ability to take full ownership of problems and learn whatever is needed to solve them</li> <li>Comfortable moving quickly in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities and tight deadlines</li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:</span></h3> <ul> <li>Contributions to open-source search or infrastructure projects</li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS</strong></span></h3> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">$150,000 - $400,000 USD</span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">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 &amp; long-term disability insurance, life insurance, and various other discounts and perks.</span></p><div class="content-conclusion"><p><em>SpaceXAI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our </em><em><a href="https://x.ai/legal/recruitment-privacy-notice" target="_blank">Recruitment Privacy Notice</a>.</em></p></div>