TL;DR
Software Engineer, Compute Infra (AI): Designing, building, and operating massive-scale clusters and orchestration platforms that power frontier AI training, inference, and agent workloads. Focus on achieving superior scalability, isolation, resource efficiency, and fault-tolerance compared to off-the-shelf solutions.
Location: Must be located in Palo Alto, CA
Salary: $180,000 - $440,000 USD
Company
xAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge.
What you will do
- Build and manage massive-scale clusters to host, persist, train, and serve AI workloads with extreme reliability and performance.
- Design, develop, and extend an in-house container orchestration platform that achieves superior scalability, isolation, resource efficiency, and fault-tolerance.
- Collaborate with research teams to architect and optimize compute clusters specifically for large-scale training runs, inference services, and real-time applications.
- Profile, debug, and resolve complex system-level performance bottlenecks, resource contention, scheduling issues, and reliability problems across the full stack.
- Own end-to-end infrastructure initiatives with first-principles design, rigorous testing, automation, and continuous optimization to support frontier AI compute demands.
Requirements
- Deep expertise in virtualization technologies (KVM, Xen, QEMU) and advanced containerization/sandboxing (Kata, Firecracker, gVisor, Sysbox, or equivalent).
- Strong proficiency in systems programming languages such as C/C++ and Rust.
- Proven track record profiling, debugging, and optimizing complex system-level performance issues, with deep knowledge of Linux kernel internals, resource management, scheduling, memory management, and low-level engineering.
- Hands-on experience building or significantly enhancing distributed compute platforms, orchestration systems, or high-performance infrastructure at scale.
- Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, meritocratic environment with full ownership, high standards, and a focus on rigorous execution.
Nice to have
- Experience in Linux kernel development, hypervisor extensions, or low-level system programming for compute-intensive workloads.
- Proven track record operating or designing large-scale AI training/inference clusters (GPU/TPU scale).
- Experience with custom runtimes, isolation techniques, or bespoke platforms for specialized AI compute.
- Familiarity with performance tools, tracing, and debugging in production distributed environments.
Culture & Benefits
- 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.