Software Engineer - Internal Tools

About xAI

xAI’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. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.

About the Role

The xAI Tooling team (Starfleet) is looking for a backend engineer who will be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining robust, scalable backend systems that empower our researchers, engineers, and product teams to build, experiment with, and deploy cutting‑edge AI models and applications more effectively. In this role, you will own high‑impact tooling projects including internal APIs, data pipelines, orchestration layers, and tooling platforms that streamline workflows for training, inference, evaluation, and deployment. If you’re excited to create the foundational tools that make building the world’s most powerful AI systems faster and more efficient, this role offers the chance to have outsized impact at the frontier of AI development.

Responsibilities

• Design and build robust, scalable backend systems to power our AI‑driven tools and platforms.
• Develop APIs and distributed systems that handle high‑throughput data processing for model training and evaluation.
• Create secure, reliable pipelines to support innovative human data generation and agentic workflows.
• Optimize infrastructure to leverage cutting‑edge GPU resources for maximum performance.
• Innovate new approaches that bring us closer to our goal: to develop AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge.

Required Qualifications

• Experience building high‑performance backend systems in dynamic, fast‑paced environments - as a tech lead, former founder, etc.
• Expertise in designing scalable distributed systems and APIs with a compiled language like Rust or C++.
• Experience optimizing data pipelines for machine learning workloads or real‑time applications.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with frontend technologies (e.g., TypeScript, React) to collaborate seamlessly with cross‑functional teams.

Annual Salary Range

$180,000 - $440,000 USD

Benefits

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.