Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure
xAI · Palo Alto, California, United States
About this role
**SpaceXAI — 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. We operate with a flat organizational structure—employees are expected to be hands-on, communicate clearly, and contribute directly to the mission. --- ## 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. --- ## Responsibilities - Design and build large-scale search infrastructure (real-time indexing, serving, and data pipelines) that handles massive write/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 help maintain a high bar --- ## 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 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 --- ## Preferred Skills and Experience - Contributions to open-source search or infrastructure projects --- ## Compensation and Benefits - **$150,000 – $400,000 USD** (base salary) - Equity and comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage - Access to a 401(k) retirement plan - Short & long-term disability insurance, life insurance, and various other discounts/perks *SpaceXAI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice: https://x.ai/legal/recruitment-privacy-notice*
Listing freshness
CronJobs last confirmed this listing 6d ago. If its source stops confirming the opening for seven days, this page is removed from active inventory.