Software Engineer – Real-Time Storage

xAI; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 264,000 - 440,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical/Vision/Dental coverage

401(k) retirement plan

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Discounts and perks

Job summary

xAI in California is seeking exceptional storage and database engineers to join a new project that deeply integrates our AI infrastructure into a platform used by hundreds of millions of users monthly. You will help build a new storage tier powering training, inference, recommendations and real-time data extraction.

Join a small, hands-on team focused on reliability, performance, and scalable systems. You will design, implement, and operate components across the stack while mentoring peers and

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software development experience.
• 2+ years building storage systems or databases.
• Strong focus on reliability and performance.
• Proficiency in high-performance languages (C, Rust, or JVM).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and productionize new storage features across systems.
• Diagnose performance issues and address latency and durability requirements for customers.
• Lead and participate in incident responses and postmortems.
• Mentor peers through code and design reviews in a collaborative environment.
• Stay open to learning new skills and technologies on the job.
• Make data-driven decisions and adapt to new information.

Skills

Distributed systems

C/C++

Rust

JVM languages

Tools

FoundationDB

S3

RocksDB

Memcached

Redis

MySQL

Kubernetes

Linux

Job description

About xAI

xAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organization is for individuals who appreciate challenging themselves and thrive on curiosity. We operate with a flat organizational structure. All employees are expected to be hands-on and to contribute directly to the company’s mission. Leadership is given to those who show initiative and consistently deliver excellence. Work ethic and strong prioritization skills are important. All engineers are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.

About the role

We’re looking for exceptional storage & database engineers who want to join us on a new project to deeply integrate xAI’s advanced AI infrastructure into a platform used by around 600 million users every month. We’re building xAI’s new storage tier that powers training, inference, recommendations, and real-time data extraction.

We build and operate:

• An exabyte-scale S3-compatible object store
• A multi-tenant transactional key/value store that serves 100s of millions requests per second
• A caching tier that serves billions of requests per second
• A scalable vector database that powers our recommendation systems
• A few other specialized databases serving hundreds of millions requests per second

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and launch to production new features and improvements aimed at unifying common components across the storage systems
• Dive into performance issues and work with customers and deliver solutions to cater to customers’ latency, availability and data durability requirements.
• Lead and drive incident responses and recovery with your peers. Review and contribute to incident postmortems and hold a high bar for the same.
• Work in a collaborative environment and uplevel your peers by doing mentoring, code and design reviews.
• Be open to develop new skills and learn on the job as we navigate new technology spaces.
• Ground your decisions with data and reasoning and adapt to new information to make informed choices.

Who You Are

• Have at least 7 years of experience in software development, plus 2 years building storage systems or databases.
• Obsessed with reliability, performance, and quality
• Proficient in high performance C , Rust, or JVM-based languages
• Expertise in building, running, and operating scalable and resilient distributed systems

Tech Stack

Java, Scala, Rust, Go, C/C

Linux, Kubernetes, Puppet

FoundationDB, ValKey, S3, RockDB, Memcache, Redis, MySQL

Annual Salary Range

$180,000 – $440,000 USD

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.

xAI is an equal opportunity employer.

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