Backend Engineer - API
<div class="content-intro"><h3><strong><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ABOUT xAI</span></strong></h3> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">xAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organization is for individuals who appreciate challenging themselves and thrive on curiosity. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">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. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">All employees are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.</span></p></div><h3 data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ABOUT THE ROLE:</span></h3> <p>As an ideal candidate you have a good understanding of how highly scalable and reliable production infrastructure is built. Most of our backend infrastructure is written in Rust. So familiarity with a compiled language such as C++, Rust, or Go is highly beneficial.</p> <h3><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">RESPONSIBILITIES:</span></h3> <ul> <li>Build the xAI API that serves our models to developers worldwide</li> <li>Own the end-to-end system responsible for high-throughput inference, handling billions of tokens per minute with low latency and high availability, including model serving infrastructure, request routing, SDK development, rate limiting, observability, and efficient scaling</li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:</span></h3> <ul> <li>Expert knowledge of either Rust or C++</li> <li>Experience in designing, implementing, and maintaining reliable and horizontally scalable distributed systems</li> <li>Knowledge of service observability and reliability best practices</li> <li>Experience in operating commonly used databases such as PostgreSQL, Clickhouse, and MongoDB</li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:</span></h3> <ul> <li>Experience with LLM inference engines and serving frameworks (e.g., SGLang, TensorRT, vLLM)</li> <li>Experience designing or building with agent SDKs and agent orchestration frameworks</li> <li>Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and containerized applications</li> <li>Expert knowledge of gRPC (unary, response streaming, bi-directional streaming, REST mapping)</li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS</strong></span></h3> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">$180,000 - $440,000 USD</span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></p><div class="content-conclusion"><p><em>xAI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our </em><em><a href="https://x.ai/legal/recruitment-privacy-notice" target="_blank">Recruitment Privacy Notice</a>.</em></p></div>