Jobs › Companies › xAI › Sr. Software Engineer, Real-Time Storage

About this Sr. Software Engineer, Real-Time Storage role at xAI

xAI · Onsite · Palo Alto, CA

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.

SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER, REAL-TIME STORAGE

We’re looking for exceptional storage & database engineers who want to join us on a new project to deeply integrate SpaceXSI's advanced AI infrastructure into a platform used by around 600 million users every month. We’re building a new storage tier that powers training, inference, recommendations, and real-time data extraction. 

We build and operate an exabyte-scale S3-compatible object store, a multi-tenant transactional key/value store that serves 100s of millions requests per second, a caching tier that serves billions of requests per second, scalable vector database that powers our recommendation systems, and a few other specialized databases serving hundreds of millions requests per second. 

RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Design, build, and launch to production new features and improvements aimed at unifying common components across the storage systems
  • Dive into performance issues and work with customers and deliver solutions to cater to customers’ latency, availability and data durability requirements
  • Lead and drive incident responses and recovery with your peers
  • Review and contribute to incident postmortems and hold a high bar for the same
  • Work in a collaborative environment and up-level your peers by doing mentoring and code and design reviews
  • Develop new skills and learn on the job as we navigate new technology spaces
  • Ground your decisions with data and reasoning and adapt to new information to make informed choices

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

  • Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, math, or technical discipline; OR 5+ years of experience in software development building storage systems or databases in lieu of a degree
  • Experience with high-performance C++, Rust, or JVM-based languages

PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

  • 7+ years of experience in software development building storage systems or databases
  • Obsessed with reliability, performance, and quality
  • Expertise in building, running, and operating scalable and resilient distributed systems

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:

$180,000 - $330,000 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.

Ready to apply to xAI?
Apply to xAI

How this Software Engineer salary compares

This role pays $255,000/yr — in line with the typical range for Software Engineer roles.

$145,000 median $200,000 $310,000

Typical range $160,000–$266,745/yr, from 137 comparable Software Engineer listings on JobsRadar (pay annualized to USD). See Software Engineer salary insights →

Similar jobs

Woven By Toyota
Senior Software Engineer, AD/ADAS, Vehicle Platform
Woven By Toyota
⚡ Apply early Palo Alto, CA Hybrid $140,000–$230,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 31m ago
xAI
Sr. Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure
xAI
⚡ Apply early Palo Alto, CA Onsite $180,000–$330,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 1h ago
xAI
Sr. Software Engineer, Training/Inference (C++)
xAI
⚡ Apply early Palo Alto, CA Onsite $220,000–$357,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 1h ago
xAI
Software Engineer, Training/Inference (C++)
xAI
⚡ Apply early Palo Alto, CA; Seattle, WA Onsite $160,000–$250,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 1h ago
AppLovin
Software Engineer, Machine Learning
AppLovin
⚡ Apply early Palo Alto, CA Onsite $221,000–$331,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 7h ago
WorkWhile
Software Engineer, Fullstack
WorkWhile
⚡ Apply early Toronto Hybrid $205,000–$215,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 12m ago
Triumph
Software Engineer (Operations Technology & Automation)
Triumph
⚡ Apply early United States | East Bay Onsite $200,000–$400,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 12m ago
Triumph
Senior Software Engineer (AI Tooling)
Triumph
⚡ Apply early San Francisco HQ Onsite $200,000–$400,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 12m ago
Triumph
Senior Software Engineer (Infrastructure )
Triumph
⚡ Apply early San Francisco HQ Onsite $200,000–$400,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 12m ago

Sign up for suggestions tailored to the jobs you open and the searches you save.

More jobs at xAI

See all jobs at xAI →

Apply now
🤖

Whoa — hold up

JobsRadar was built for real people having a rough time in their job search — not for automated requests. You're clicking way too fast and you're now temporarily blocked.

Come back later. If you're genuinely job hunting, we've got your back — just act like a human.

Catch your next role the second it’s posted.

Create a free account and we’ll watch the boards for you — the instant a job matches your search, it lands in your inbox or Telegram. No digging, no refreshing.

Create free account

Free forever · takes 30 seconds · already have one?

Get an edge on your job hunt.

Join our Telegram channel for the stuff that helps you land the role — salary benchmarks, the weekly market pulse, and new-feature drops. No spam, just signal.

Join the channel — it's free