Member of Technical Staff - Coding Agents, Infrastructure - Data, Sandbox

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 engineers are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.

About the Team

The Grok Code Team at xAI focuses on pushing the boundaries of Software Engineering where AI is in the front and centre of the full developer loop.

About the Role

In this role you will:

• You will build the best in class Coding Agents focussing on building the best in class Software Engineering stack which is AI first and AI native.
• Build infrastructure to collect and organize data and develop highly precise and scalable retrieval systems.
• Build RL Environments useful for coding agents and scale environments to generalize Agents to interact and learn from.

Exceptional candidates may have:

• Experience in developer tooling with AI first mindset for the changing world.
• Experience in either large-scale data infrastructure like OLAP frameworks (e.g., BigQuery), Data Processing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Polars, Parquet, etc.), and Embedding and Retrieval Infrastructure (e.g., vector search, ranking algorithms, etc.) or building and managing large fleets of isolated compute units (e.g., Docker, Containers, Kubernetes, gVisor, Chromium, etc.).
• Technically deep with a first-principles thinking approach (e.g. how should one go about designing networking stack such that multiple processes have separate network interfaces, routing tables, and firewall rules etc.)
• Experience building highly scalable and reliable services in Rust/C++.

Location

• We hire engineers in Palo Alto. Our team usually works from the office 5 days a week but allow work-from-home days when required. Candidates are expected to be located near Palo Alto or open to relocation.

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 (“phone interview”) during which a member of our team will ask some basic questions. If you clear the initial phone interview, you will enter the main process, which consists of four technical interviews:

1. Coding assessment in a language of your choice.

2. 2x coding rounds in a language of your choice, focusing on problem-solving and implementation skills.

3. System design round: This session will test your ability to design scalable, efficient, and robust systems, focusing on architecture, trade-offs, and system-level thinking.

4. Meet the Team: Present your past exceptional work and your vision with xAI to a small audience.

Our goal is to finish the main process within one week. All interviews will be conducted via Google Meet.