Twitter is used to share information quickly. Because tweets can be delivered to followers in real time, they might seem like instant messages (IM) to the novice user. But unlike IMs that disappear when the user closes the application, tweets are also posted on the Twitter website.
Forward Deployed AI Engineer
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. Engineers are encouraged to work across multiple areas of the company, and as a result, all engineers and researchers share the title “Member of Technical Staff.”
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 engineers and researchers are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.
About the Role
Forward Deployed AI Engineers work directly with our end customers owning strategy and execution. Your responsibilities look similar to that of a hands-on AI startup CTO: you’ll work in a small team to own delivery of high stakes projects with clients. A day’s work may include:
- Deliver solutions end to end that meet the needs of our customers – understanding user pain points, scoping product specs, and designing and building LLM-powered software
- Benchmarking the model or help write evals for customers to identify model weaknesses
- Improve model performance by system prompt tuning or fine tuning models
- Analyze request logs or read through prompt data
- Build internal tooling to automate yourself out of the job
- Improving xAI SDKs or developer documentation based on customer feedback
Focus
- Strong passion for solving real-world business problems and delivering measurable impact through AI solutions.
- Proven track record of shipping high-quality code and successfully completing projects in challenging environments.
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and adapt to changing requirements and priorities in a fast-paced startup environment.
- Strong communication skills that will become important when interfacing with customers to clarify requirements and drive a project to completion.
- Emphasis on designing, implementing, and maintaining robust and scalable AI-driven solutions.
- Proficiency in working with large, complex codebases and designing efficient data processing and model serving architectures
An ideal candidate meets at least the following requirements:
- 2+ years of software engineering experience preferred
- Great verbal and written communication skills in English
- Ability to turn business and product ideas into engineering solutions
- Proven experience in AI or machine learning product implementation with APIs, back-end and front-end interfaces
- Experience in Python and/or TypeScript
- Understanding of the HTTP protocol
- Strong engineering background, preferred in fields such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics, and Data Science
Furthermore, candidates may stand out by having any of the following experiences:
- Building evals for new capabilities and evaluating our systems
- Demonstrating an understanding of machine learning fundamentals, including model evaluation, training and fine-tuning
- Deploying machine learning models to production
- Writing developer documentation
- Creating and maintaining SDKs
- Showcasing the ability to work with massive datasets, optimize performance, and scale systems to handle high-throughput workloads
- Using Pulumi or Terraform
Interview Process
After submitting your application, the team reviews your CV and statement of exceptional work. If your application passes this stage, you will be invited to a 15 minute interview (“technical phone interview”) during which a member of our team will ask technical questions about your background or specialization. If you clear the initial phone interview, you will enter the main process, which consists of four technical interviews:
- Coding assessment in a language of your choice.
- Systems hands-on: Demonstrate practical skills in a live problem-solving session.
- Project deep-dive: Present your past exceptional work to a small audience.
- Meet and greet with the wider team.
Our goal is to finish the main process within one week. We don’t rely on recruiters for assessments. Every application is reviewed by a member of our technical team. All interviews will be conducted via Google Meet or in-person.
Benefits
- Competitive cash-based compensation
- xAI equity
- Private health and dental insurance
- Unlimited time off subject to prior approval
Software Engineer – Compute
Are you prepared to join the X team and help build the ultimate real-time information-sharing app, revolutionizing how people connect? At X, we’re on a mission to become the trusted global digital public square, committed to protecting freedom of speech and building the future unlimited interactivity. Our goal is to empower every user to freely create and share ideas, fostering open public discourse without barriers. Join us in shaping this thrilling journey where your contribution will be invaluable to our success!
Role: Software Engineer – Compute (All Levels)
Location: New York
Salary Range: $127,000 to $297,000 + Equity
_
Who We Are:
X serves our community of users and customers by working tirelessly to preserve free expression and choice, create limitless interactivity, and create a marketplace that enables the economic success of all its participants.
Compute team, responsible for providing X Engineering with an approachable, productive, and reliable compute platform. Our infrastructure powers most of the services behind X.com, X’s revenue-generating businesses, and a variety of internal infrastructure and has the largest server footprint in our datacenters. X’s hundreds of engineers use our compute platform to launch and operate their services on a fleet consisting of 100,000s of servers.
Despite being a small team, our compute platform is built using the largest Aurora/Mesos clusters in the world. Therefore we need to build software that is highly scalable, reliable, cost efficient, and operationally automated.
We also have a more nascent Kubernetes platform, which in the long run we’d like to transition towards. However, this comes with significant technical challenges given the maturity and scale of our current Aurora/Mesos clusters; we would be running one of the largest Kubernetes environments in the world.
Who You Are:
We are looking for talented engineers who draw motivation from building infrastructure and platforms that help others be more productive. We’re not working on a traditional consumer product, but we are building the platform that other teams will use to build and run the X product. You favor sustainable, scalable, and automation-focused approaches to the systems you design and build. You’re comfortable iterating quickly and experimenting when exploring a new problem, but you know when and how to invest in automating and documenting your work so it’s discoverable and useful to others. You are curious and driven to understand new technical spaces and problems. You are an engaged and thoughtful collaborator, ready to solve challenging problems with your peers. Quality and reliability are key pillars in your software engineering philosophy.
What You’ll Do:
In this role, you will:
- Participate in building and operating the mission-critical compute infrastructure that powers X.
- Participate in systems review processes, growing into system design contributions.
- Actively engage in knowledge sharing – great documentation is really important, and we should have that for the folks who operate the platform, and for the customers who rely on our product.
Qualifications:
- Proficiency in languages like Java, C++, Python, Golang, Scala
- Experience with cluster management and containerization technologies is very helpful (e.g. kubernetes, docker, mesos, borg)
- Independent learning capabilities for new technologies
- Extremely committed, willing to work in a fast paced environment
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
Software Engineer – Payments
Are you prepared to join the X team and help build the ultimate real-time information-sharing app, revolutionizing how people connect? At X, we’re on a mission to become the trusted global digital public square, committed to protecting freedom of speech and building the future unlimited interactivity. Our goal is to empower every user to freely create and share ideas, fostering open public discourse without barriers. Join us in shaping this thrilling journey where your contribution will be invaluable to our success!
Software Engineer – Payments
Location – Palo Alto, CA or New York, NY (onsite)
Base Salary Range – $127,000 to $297,000 + Equity
_
The financial industry is slow and bloated. It takes days for simple transfers to clear between bank accounts. Settlements still occur using ancient batch processing computers running on Cobol. Hidden fees dominate the profits of the large banks. At X, we want to rethink banking and commerce from first principles. We are looking for hungry engineers with the ambition to take on the banks and build one of the biggest financial services platforms in the world. Come help build out the original x.com vision from the ground floor.
Who We Are:
At X, we’re building an Everything App where people can connect, share ideas, and engage in meaningful conversations. Our mission is to foster freedom of speech and empower individuals to express themselves freely. We believe in the power of open dialogue and aim to create a platform for all perspectives.
We Value:
- Writing code rather than documents
- Shipping products rather than talking about roadmaps
- Big features rather than changing button colors
If this sounds like you, let’s talk.
What You’ll Do:
As a Software Engineer on Payments, you will be responsible for the design, development, and maintenance of our Payments platform. Your responsibilities will include:
- Architecting and implementing scalable, secure, and efficient backend systems for Payments
- Collaborating with cross-functional teams to develop new features and integrations with financial partners
- Writing clean, maintainable, and well-documented code in Golang
- Ensuring the performance, reliability, and scalability of our backend systems
- Mentoring junior engineers and contributing to the team’s growth
- Staying informed about industry trends and emerging technologies in the monetization space
Who You Are:
We’re looking for exceptional engineers who are passionate about our mission and have a strong desire to make a meaningful impact. The ideal candidate will have:
- 2+ years of industry experience working with large scale, high throughput distributed systems and data pipelines
- Proficient in Golang/Scala/Typescript or similar languages; an expert in a majority of language constructs and able to apply them fluently to solve complex problems
- Security first mindset with a track record of building and shipping user-facing products and features
- Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP) and containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
- Experience with any of the following is a plus: ledgers, distributed transactions, card issuance and authorization, identity verification, fraud and risk
