Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure

xai

Palo Alto, California · Palo Alto · United States

Posted Aug 6, 2026

Other
Engineering

Job description

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. 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:

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.

SpaceXAI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice.