Software Engineer - X Data (AI)

TL;DR

Software Engineer - X Data (AI): Building and operating a distributed data platform with an accent on realtime and batch pipelines processing billions of events per day. Focus on designing production-grade data products, ensuring end-to-end data correctness, and optimizing high-scale distributed storage and compute.

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Salary: $125,000 - $400,000 USD

Company

xAI is an AI research and development company dedicated to creating systems that accurately understand the universe to aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate production-grade realtime and batch pipelines for user-behavior insights and product decisions.
• Create shared datasets, fact tables, and internal data products to help teams analyze and improve performance.
• Develop automation tooling for internal data workflows, including backfills, dashboards, and self-serve access.
• Own data correctness end-to-end through validation, reconciliation, and root-cause investigations.
• Work across multiple query engines and frameworks such as BigQuery, Trino, Clickhouse, Flink, Kafka, and Spark.
• Partner with AI, product, and business teams to identify data gaps and prioritize high-impact acquisition opportunities.

Requirements

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally in data engineering or distributed systems.
• Hands-on expertise in Python, Rust, Scala, Go, or Java.
• Knowledge of realtime and batch processing tools (Spark, Kafka, Flink, SQL) and RDBMS/NoSQL storage systems.
• Experience solving large-scale problems and building systems that enable continuous quality improvements.
• Proven ability to translate product requirements into engineering implementation plans.

Culture & Benefits

• Flat organizational structure where leadership is earned through initiative and excellence.
• Competitive base salary and equity grants.
• Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage.
• Access to a 401(k) retirement plan.
• Life insurance and short/long-term disability insurance.
• High-performance environment focused on curiosity and engineering excellence.