About the Company:
X is Alphabet’s moonshot factory. We are a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs who build and launch technologies that aim to improve the lives of millions, even billions, of people. Our goal: 10x impact on the world’s most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement. We approach projects that have the aspiration and riskiness of research with the speed and ambition of a startup.
About the Team:
We are an early-stage project at X working to revolutionize the industrial world by making material transformation intelligent. Our mission is to reduce the massive waste in material harvesting and processing—a growing sector faced with numerous challenges including resource exhaustion, rising energy costs, and a sizable carbon footprint. We are building a system that combines sensing, multimodal AI, agentic digital twins, and advanced physics-based simulation to automate the continuous optimization of complex industrial processes.
About the Role:
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to serve as the technical architect and infrastructure backbone of our engineering efforts. You will move between writing backend code, designing scalable cloud infrastructure, and managing a team of external engineers.
You will define how we build. You will take experimental ML models and orchestrate them into a cohesive, product-grade system capable of ingesting complex customer data and optimizing real-world industrial processes.
How you will make 10x impact:
- System Architecture & Backend Ownership: Drive the technical architecture evolution in collaboration with the wider engineering team, while maintaining hands-on ownership of the core backend development. You will build the cloud-native infrastructure that serves as the foundation for orchestrating computer vision, document ingestion, knowledge graph model development, agentic systems for real world physical applications.
- Vendor & Technical Management: Act as the technical lead for a team of external ML/SWE contractors. Perform code reviews, set architectural standards, and ensure seamless integration of their contributions (e.g., computer vision models, ontology definitions) into the main codebase.
- Productization: Lead the transition of our technology from "research prototypes" to "deployed pilots." Ensure our systems can handle real-time sensor data integration and meet the security/reliability standards of enterprise partners (e.g., global industrial conglomerates).
- Cross-Functional Coordination: Bridge the gap between deep-tech research (physics modeling, sensing, ML) and software delivery.
What you should have:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
- 7+ years of experience in software engineering with a focus on backend systems, cloud infrastructure (GCP/AWS), and API design.
- Demonstrated experience in a Technical Lead capacity, specifically managing external vendors or distributed engineering teams.
- Strong experience with one or more general purpose programming languages such as Python, C/C++, as well as experience with containerization/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Experience designing systems that utilize Large Language Models (LLMs), RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), Knowledge Graphs and agentic systems. Even better if you've curated evaluation or benchmarking datasets and delivered this in production environments in performance-sensitive environments.
It’d be great if you also had these:
- Familiarity with Vison Language Models and handling multimodal data (images, diagrams, text).
- Familiarity with LLM fine tuning (supervised or reinforcement learning)
- Background or strong interest in industrial automation, or physics-based simulation.
- Exposure to material processing, or manufacturing sectors is a strong plus.
- Ability to thrive in ambiguity and navigate the "0 to 1" phase of product development.
The US base salary range for this full-time position is $165,000 - $230,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your location during the hiring process.
Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits.
Top Skills
What We Do
We create breakthrough technologies to help solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Born at Google, we got our start creating self-driving cars and smart glasses. Since then, we’ve continued to bring sci-fi ideas into reality.
