Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure

SpaceXAI’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 employees are expected to have strong communication skills and to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.

About The Role

As a backend engineer, you’ll design and build scalable, high-performance systems that power search infrastructure, including real-time indexing, serving, and data pipelines. You’ll work on mission-critical infrastructure that processes massive write and query loads with strict latency and reliability requirements, enabling creators to earn a living through their content. This is a unique opportunity to make a large-scale impact while creating products that users and businesses love.

Responsibilities

• Design and build large-scale search infrastructure (real-time indexing, serving, and data pipelines) that handles massive write and query loads with strict latency and reliability requirements
• Go deep into search internals (indexing, query execution, and relevance) and help shape the technical direction of the core search infrastructure
• Operate production services end-to-end, including monitoring, debugging, incident response, and performance optimization
• Lead and drive incident responses and recovery with your peers
• Review and contribute to incident postmortems and hold a high bar for the same

Qualifications

• 5+ years developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems, or experience with storage or hardware architecture
• Proficient in high-performance Rust, C++, or JVM-based languages
• Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies (Elasticsearch, Lucene, or similar) and an understanding of how they work and why
• Experience with operating system internals, filesystems, networking, or database storage engines
• Obsessed with performance, reliability, scalability, and quality
• Ability to take full ownership of problems and learn whatever is needed to solve them
• Comfortable moving quickly in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities and tight deadlines

Skills

• Contributions to open-source search or infrastructure projects

Pay

$150,000 - $400,000 USD base salary

Benefits

• Equity
• Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage
• Access to a 401(k) retirement plan
• Short- and long-term disability insurance
• Life insurance
• Various other discounts and perks