Xai · Palo Alto, CA

Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure at Xai — Palo Alto, CA

Full-timePalo Alto, CA$150,000–$400,000/yearPosted 2026-08-05Apply on Greenhouse

Full job description

### ABOUT THE ROLE:

As a 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

### BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

  • 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) and an understanding of how they work and why
  • Experience with operating system internals, filesystems, networking, or database storage engines
  • 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

### PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

  • Contributions to open-source search or infrastructure projects

### COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

$150,000 - $400,000 USD

Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at xAI, 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.

Required skills

  • c++
  • communication
  • elasticsearch
  • rust