Startup Hiring Index · threadangellabs
xAI › Engineering

Software Engineer - Training/Inference (C++)

xAI · Palo Alto / Seattle

Pay
$180K–$440K
From the posting
Posted
Jul 14, 2026
Tracked open for 104 days
Team
Infrastructure
Full-time
xAI hiring
298 open roles
116 in engineering

What does $180K–$440K take home in Washington State? See after-tax pay →

CUDA / GPURustC++LLMs
Apply on xAI's site → Alert me about roles like this

Typical software engineer pay at startups: $221K median, middle half $188K–$256K (2,406 posted ranges).

Typical engineering pay at xAI: $180K–$440K — median of 52 listed ranges.

Across all startups we track: $170K–$242K for engineering roles (8,053 listed ranges).

About the role

SpaceXAI’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 employees are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.


About the Role:

  • We are building the high-performance inference platform that serves Grok to millions of users every day with lightning speed and perfect reliability.
  • As a Member of Technical Staff - Inference, you will design and optimize large-scale model serving systems end-to-end. You will own everything from distributed infrastructure (global KV cache, continuous batching, load balancing, auto-scaling) to deep low-level optimizations (GPU kernels, quantization, speculative decoding, tail latency).
  • This is a high-impact role where your work directly determines how fast and reliably users interact with Grok at massive scale

Responsibilities: 

  • Architect and implement scalable distributed infrastructure for model serving (load balancing, auto-scaling, batch scheduling, global KV cache).
  • Optimize latency and throughput of model inference under real production workloads.
  • Build reliable, high-concurrency serving systems that serve billions of users with 100% uptime, 0% error rate, and excellent tail latency.
  • Benchmark, fine-tune, and accelerate inference engines (including low-level GPU kernel work and code generation).
  • Develop custom tools to trace, replay, and fix issues across the full stack — from orchestration down to GPU kernels.
  • Create robust CI/CD infrastructure for seamless endpoint deployment, image publishing, and inference engine updates.
  • Accelerate research on scaling test-time compute, RL rollout, and model-hardware co-design for next-generation systems.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

  • Deep low-level systems programming (C/C++ or Rust)
  • Experience with large-scale, high-concurrent production serving.
  • Experience with GPU inference engines (vLLM, SGLang, Triton, TensorRT-LLM, etc.).
  • Strong background in system optimizations: batching, caching, load balancing, parallelism.
  • Low-level inference optimizations: GPU kernels, code generation.
  • Algorithmic inference optimizations: quantization, speculative decoding, distillation, low-precision numerics.
  • Experience with testing, benchmarking, and reliability of inference services.
  • Experience designing and implementing CI/CD infrastructure for inference.

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:

$180,000 - $440,000 USD

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

SpaceXAI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice.

From xAI's careers page. First seen Jul 15, 2026, last verified Oct 25, 2026.

xAI hiring momentum

Open roles: 298, up 6 (+2%) over the last 30 days.

Jul 15, 2026 · 210Oct 25, 2026 · 298

More engineering roles at xAI

xAI · Southaven, MS; Memphis, TN · Engineering · 3d ago
Apply →
xAI · Memphis, TN · Engineering · 4d ago
Apply →
xAI · Palo Alto, CA; Austin, TX; New York, NY; Washington, DC · Engineering · 4d ago
$100K–$258K Apply →
xAI · Palo Alto, CA; New York, NY; Washington, DC · Engineering · 4d ago
$100K–$228K Apply →
xAI · Palo Alto, CA; Austin, TX; New York, NY; Washington, DC · Engineering · 4d ago
$100K–$198K Apply →
xAI · Southaven, MS; Memphis, TN · Engineering · 10d ago
Apply →

All 116 xAI engineering jobs →

Similar roles at other startups

Temporal · United States (Remote) · Engineering · today
$118K–$194K Apply →
Neuralink · Austin, Texas, United States; South San Francisco, California, United States · Engineering · today
$123K–$216K Apply →
Astranis · San Francisco · Engineering · today
$130K–$165K Apply →
Celonis · Tokyo, Japan · Engineering · today
Apply →
Smartsheet · Bangalore, INDIA · Engineering · today
Apply →
Wayve · Sunnyvale, California USA · Engineering · today
$348K–$403K Apply →

Browse engineering jobs →