Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 16, 2026. First seen by Alion on Aug 6, 2026. xAI scores A on the Alion truth index.
SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today, SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary and expanding consciousness to the stars.
SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to understand the universe and help expand humanity’s knowledge and capabilities. We work across the full Super Intelligence stack: compute (Colossus supercomputers), models (Grok), and applications (Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X). We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next.
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.
SpaceXSI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice.