Software Engineer - X Data

Details

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

As a Data Engineer in X product engineering team, you will play a key role in providing comprehensive data solutions that own or serve a wide range of stakeholders, including end-users and internal teams such as Product engineering, Algorithm, Legal, Finance and Sales. The work utilizes AI, distributed computing and hybrid storage technologies and spans realtime and batch data challenges to maximize the potential of data for the product and business.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate a distributed data platform powering hundreds of realtime and batch pipelines processing billions of events per day.
• Build and operate production-grade realtime and batch pipelines that ingest, process, validate, and deliver data powering user-behavior insights and product decisions.
• Create shared datasets, fact tables, and internal data products that let other teams analyze, debug, and improve product performance.
• Prototype and build tooling to automate internal data workflows — backfills, dashboards, report generation, and self-serve access to data.
• Own data correctness end to end: validate with output invariants, denominator reconciliation, and independent recomputation; lead root-cause investigations when key metrics move unexpectedly.
• Move fluidly across query engines and frameworks (e.g., BigQuery, Trino, ClickHouse for analytics; Flink, Kafka, Spark/Scalding for streaming and batch), choosing the right tool and adapting quickly to new infrastructure and environments.
• Partner across product and business teams to surface data gaps and prioritize high-impact opportunities for new data acquisition and improvement.
• Iterate quickly on feedback, shipping the smallest useful increment with a strong bias toward efficient, accurate, and reliable solutions.

Requirements

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally in data engineering or distributed systems.
• Hands-on expertise in one or more of: Python, Rust, Scala, Go, or Java, and experience with data pipeline tooling and distributed systems.
• Knowledge of realtime and batch data processing tools such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, and SQL, and familiarity with storage systems (RDBMS / NoSQL).
• Experience solving large-scale problems and comfort doing incremental quality work while building new systems to enable future improvements.
• Proven ability to interpret product requirements into engineering implementation plans and communicate effectively with AI, product, marketing/sales and engineering groups.

Compensation and Benefits

• $125,000 - $400,000 USD (base salary range).
• Total rewards package includes equity, comprehensive medical/vision/dental coverage, access to a 401(k) retirement plan, short & long-term disability insurance, life insurance, and other discounts and perks.

xAI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view the Recruitment Privacy Notice linked on the original posting.