SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today, SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary and expanding consciousness to the stars.
SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe. Our teams are building the full Super Intelligence stack: from our Colossus supercomputers, to Grok models, to our suite of applications, including Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X. We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next.
As a senior 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
- 5+ years developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems or experience with storage or hardware architecture
- Experience with high performance Rust, C++ or JVM-based languages
- Experience with operating system internals, filesystems, networking, or database storage engines
- Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies (Elasticsearch, Lucene, or similar) and an understanding of how they work and why
- 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
- Contributions to open-source search or infrastructure projects
$150,000 - $400,000 USD
Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at SpaceXSI, 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.
SpaceXSI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice.
Skills Required
- 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).
- Experience with operating system internals, filesystems, networking, or database storage engines.
- Strong focus on performance, reliability, scalability, and quality.
- Ability to take full ownership of problems and learn required technologies to solve them.
- Comfortable moving quickly in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities and tight deadlines.
- Contributions to open-source search or infrastructure projects.
xAI Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about xAI and has not been reviewed or approved by xAI.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare is described as comprehensive, including medical, dental, vision, mental health support, and fertility benefits. Additional protections such as disability and life insurance, plus HSA/FSA options, are also outlined.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity is positioned as a core component of total rewards alongside high base salaries for technical roles. Pre‑IPO stock grants are highlighted as enabling participation in potential company growth.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — The package includes flexible or generous PTO, paid holidays, and paid sick days. Company materials also describe flexible vacation policies intended to help manage fast‑paced workloads.
xAI Insights
What We Do
Understand the Universe
