Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure

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.