Senior Member of Technical Staff - Multimodal AI

SpaceXAI; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 440,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical coverage

Vision coverage

Dental coverage

401(k) retirement plan

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Employee discounts

Job summary

xAI in Palo Alto is seeking a senior engineer to join the multimodal team building next‑gen intelligence. You will design and optimize large‑scale distributed systems for pre-training, post-training, and inference across image, audio, video, and text modalities.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to push state‑of‑the‑art capabilities, drive data quality, and build end‑to‑end tooling and demos while owning initiatives from start to finish.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with multimodal pre-training, post-training, or fine-tuning (vision, audio, video, or cross-modal).
• Expert-level proficiency in Python (core language), with strong experience in at least one of: JAX / PyTorch / XLA.
• Proven track record building or optimizing large-scale distributed ML systems (training/inference optimization, GPU utilization, multi-GPU/TPU setups, hardware co-design).
• Deep experience designing and running data pipelines at scale: curation, filtering, generation, quality studies, especially for noisy/real-world multimodal data.
• Strong fundamentals in evaluation design, benchmarks, reward modeling, or RL techniques (particularly for interactive/agentic behaviors).
• Proactive self-starter who thrives in high-intensity environments and is passionate about pushing multimodal AI frontiers.
• Willingness to own end-to-end initiatives and do whatever it takes to deliver breakthrough user experiences.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize large-scale distributed systems for multimodal pre-training, post-training, inference, data processing.
• Develop high-throughput pipelines for data acquisition, preprocessing, filtering, generation, decoding, loading, crawling, and management.
• Advance multimodal capabilities including cross-modal alignment, world modeling, reasoning, and real-time interaction.
• Drive data quality and studies: curation, filtering, analysis, and scalable pipelines for trillion-parameter models.
• Create evaluation frameworks, internal benchmarks, reward models, and metrics for real-world usage.
• Innovate on algorithms, modeling approaches, hardware/software/algorithm co-design, and scaling paradigms.
• Build research tooling, user-friendly interfaces, prototypes/demos, full-stack applications, and end-to-end product experiences.
• Work across the stack to enable reasoning, tool calling, agentic behaviors, orchestration, and real-time interactions.

Skills

Multimodal pre-training

Python

Distributed ML systems

Data pipelines

Evaluation design / RL

Self-starter

End-to-end ownership

Tools

Rust

C++

Spark

Ray

Kubernetes

Job description

xAI in Palo Alto is seeking a senior engineer to join the multimodal team building next‑gen intelligence. You will design and optimize large‑scale distributed systems for pre-training, post-training, and inference across image, audio, video, and text modalities.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to push state‑of‑the‑art capabilities, drive data quality, and build end‑to‑end tooling and demos while owning initiatives from start to finish.