Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure
About the role
As a backend engineer, you'll design and build scalable, high-performance systems that power subscriptions infrastructure, new monetized products, user growth, and creator monetization. You'll work on mission-critical infrastructure that processes millions of transactions, optimizes user acquisition and retention, and enables creators to earn a living through their content. This is a unique opportunity to make a large-scale revenue 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
Basic 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 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
Preferred skills and experience
- Contributions to open-source search or infrastructure projects
Compensation and benefits
$150,000 - $400,000 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.