Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure (Rust/C++)

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States; onsite

Salary: $150,000–$400,000 USD base salary, plus equity and benefits.

Company

xAI develops AI systems designed to understand the universe and advance human knowledge.

What you will do

• Design and build large-scale search infrastructure for real-time indexing, query serving, and data pipelines.
• Develop systems that handle massive write and query loads while meeting strict latency and reliability requirements.
• Investigate search internals, including indexing, query execution, and relevance, and shape the technical direction of the infrastructure.
• Operate production services end to end through monitoring, debugging, incident response, and performance optimization.
• Lead incident recovery with peers and contribute to incident postmortems.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems, storage systems, or hardware architecture.
• Proficiency in high-performance Rust, C++, or JVM-based languages.
• Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch, Lucene, or similar search and indexing technologies.
• Understanding of operating system internals, filesystems, networking, or database storage engines.
• Strong focus on performance, reliability, scalability, and quality.
• Ability to work onsite in Palo Alto, California, United States.

Nice to have

• Contributions to open-source search or infrastructure projects.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on work in a small, highly motivated organization with a flat structure.
• Opportunity to contribute directly to the development of AI systems and mission-critical infrastructure.
• Equity included in the total rewards package.
• Medical, vision, and dental coverage.
• 401(k), short- and long-term disability insurance, life insurance, discounts, and other perks.