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 engineers and researchers are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.
About the Role
xAI was first in the world to build a 100k GPU cluster on an ethernet network and then did it again in 92 days, floors, walls and all. We need an engineer with deep experience in RoCEv2 that can develop at hyper scale while optimizing performance and availability.
xAI is building at a furious pace with the latest hardware to help people understand the universe. To make the next significant leap forward, we need to own our own destiny by understanding our current network performance and availability and then optimize it to our training models and how we execute customer inference queries. You will spend most of your days deep inside NCCL, building metric dashboards and tweaking configurations to ensure no performance is left on the table. You will help design the next iteration of our backend and front-end networks that will allow us to seamlessly build-out new GPU infrastructure with little to no engineering assistance.
There will be a significant amount of travel to Memphis for building more capacity as well as participating in a team on-call rotation and helping on other scaling and maintenance efforts. This will become easier as we build out the team and engineers contribute to deployment and operations frameworks to remove repetitive tasks.
Location
We have 2 openings, one based in Palo Alto, California and the other in Dublin, Ireland. There will be significant travel expected to Memphis, Tennessee for data center buildouts and to the head office in Palo Alto for team collaboration.
Ideal Experiences
Interview Process
After submitting your application, the team reviews your CV and statement of exceptional work. If your application passes this stage, you will be invited to an initial interview (45 minutes - 1 hour) during which a member of our team will ask some basic questions. If you clear the initial phone interview, you will enter the main process, which consists of five interviews:
xAI is an equal opportunity employer and does not unlawfully discriminate based on race, color, religion, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, disability, medical conditions, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics.
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.
For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:
xAI reasonably believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: