Data Engineer

About the role

xAIxAI’s mission is to create AI systems that understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. The team is small, highly motivated, and focuses on engineering excellence. Leadership is given to those who show initiative and consistently deliver excellence.

Responsibilities

• Analyze the performance and impact of data used throughout the model training lifecycle
• Investigate anomalous model behavior and rigorously identify the data issues that drive poor downstream performance
• Design, build, and improve the data cleaning, transformation, and quality-control steps required to produce high-quality training data
• Research, evaluate, and develop frontier methods for improving data quality and effectiveness in AI model development
• Apply statistical techniques and empirical analysis to make informed, data-driven decisions about dataset quality and model outcomes
• Partner across teams to identify where data needs exist and define the highest-impact opportunities for new data acquisition and improvement
• Build and maintain production-grade data pipelines, tooling, and software systems that ingest, process, validate, and deliver data for training
• Create metrics, evaluation frameworks, and monitoring systems to assess how data quality influences model behavior at scale
• Fuse data from multiple sources into reliable, usable datasets for research and production model training
• Create shared datasets, tooling, and internal data products that enable other teams to analyze, debug, and improve model performance

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, data science, physics, mathematics, or a STEM discipline
• 1+ years of data/software engineering experience (internship experience is applicable)
• Experience in implementing or analyzing language models or neural networks

PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• Professional experience in analytics, data science, machine learning, or data engineering
• Experience building and operating production data pipelines for neural network or large-scale machine learning workloads
• Strong experience with Python and the broader ecosystem of libraries and tools used in modern machine learning and data development
• Experience working with Parquet or similar columnar storage formats in large-scale data systems
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and distributed production environments
• Experience developing predictive models and machine learning pipelines, including clustering, forecasting, anomaly detection, or related techniques
• Experience working with very large-scale datasets, including terabyte- to petabyte-scale data systems
• Strong statistical intuition and the ability to use quantitative analysis to guide technical and product decisions
• Demonstrated ability to take ownership of ambiguous problems, drive projects independently, and develop new expertise where needed

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

$240,000 - $280,000 USD
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. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice.