Staff Engineer, RL Inference & Distributed Systems

Pantera Capital; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

xAI is seeking an engineer to advance low precision RL training and inference. Design and optimize the inference stack across RL workloads, from small ablations to production runs, and work with the modelling team to implement novel RL techniques.

You will tackle performance bottlenecks in large-scale systems, contribute hands-on across the stack, and help ship efficient, scalable RL infrastructure. The team values curiosity, initiative and engineering excellence in a flat organization.

Qualifications

• Experience in building, debugging, and optimizing efficiency of large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience in LLM inference.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, C++ and/or Rust; frameworks such as PyTorch, Jax, CUDA.

Responsibilities

• Design and optimize our inference stack for all shapes of RL workloads at xAI, from small scale ablations to production training runs.
• Analyze, profile and address performance bottlenecks in large scale RL systems
• Work closely with the modelling team to efficiently implement novel RL techniques and algorithms

Skills

Distributed systems

LLM inference

Python

C++

Rust

PyTorch

Jax

CUDA

Tools

SGLang

vLLM

Job description

xAI is seeking an engineer to advance low precision RL training and inference. Design and optimize the inference stack across RL workloads, from small ablations to production runs, and work with the modelling team to implement novel RL techniques.

You will tackle performance bottlenecks in large-scale systems, contribute hands-on across the stack, and help ship efficient, scalable RL infrastructure. The team values curiosity, initiative and engineering excellence in a flat organization.