Software Engineer - X Data

About the role

The Data Engineer will play a key role in providing comprehensive data solutions that own or serve a wide range of stakeholders, including our end-users and internal teams such as Product Engineering, Algorithm, Legal, Finance, and Sales. Our work utilizes AI, distributed computing, and hybrid storage technologies, but extends beyond purely data-centric solutions, encompassing non-data-related challenges, ultimately maximizing the potential of data for the benefit of our diverse user base.

Responsibilities

• Help build and operate a distributed data platform that powers hundreds of realtime and batch pipelines processing billions of events per day.
• The team runs like an internal startup — we own problems end to end, from raw event streams to the datasets, tooling, and metrics that product, growth, safety, and business teams depend on daily.
• In this role you will:
• Design, build, and operate production-grade realtime and batch pipelines that ingest, process, validate, and deliver data powering user-behavior insights and product decisions.
• Create shared datasets, fact tables, and internal data products that let other teams analyze, debug, and improve product performance.
• Prototype and build tooling that automates and accelerates internal data workflows — backfills, dashboards, report generation, and self-serve access to data.
• Own data correctness end to end: validate with output invariants, denominator reconciliation, and independent recomputation, and lead root-cause investigations when key metrics move unexpectedly.
• Move fluidly across query engines and frameworks (e.g., BigQuery, Trino, Clickhouse for analytics; Flink, Kafka, Spark/Scalding for streaming and batch), choosing the right tool and adapting quickly to new infrastructure and environments.
• Partner across product and business teams to surface where data gaps exist and prioritize the highest-impact opportunities for new data acquisition and improvement.
• Iterate quickly on feedback, shipping the smallest useful increment with a strong bias toward efficient, accurate, and reliable solutions.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• We are looking for an engineer with 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally in data engineering or distributed systems.
• Hands-on expertise in Python, Rust, Scala, Go or Java, and data pipeline toolings and distributed systems.
• Knowledge of realtime and batch data processing tools such as Spark/Kafka/Flink/SQL and various storage systems in RMDBs/NoSQL.
• Experience solving large scale problems and comfortable doing incremental quality work while building brand new systems to enable future quality improvements.
• Proven records of interpreting product requirements into engineering implementation plans, and effectively communicating with different groups (AI, product, marketing/sales and engineering).

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

Compensation: $125,000 - $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.
xAI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice.