Software Engineer, Data Platform at xAI

Compensation

$180,000 – $440,000/yr

Setup: Hybrid
Location: Palo Alto, California
Type: Full-time
Posted: Nov 13, 2025

Description

xAI is seeking a highly motivated and experienced Software Engineer for their Data Platform team. The successful candidate will be responsible for designing, building, and operating distributed systems that power X's data movement and compute. This involves working with technologies like Apache Kafka, HDFS, Spark, Flink, and Trino, and contributing to the scalability, performance, and reliability of systems processing trillions of events daily for product and ML workloads.

Required Skills

Distributed Systems
Stream Processing
Data Platforms
Rust
Go
Scala
Kafka
Flink
Spark
Trino
Hadoop
Debugging
Performance Optimization

Additional Information

Required Previous Experiences: Proven expertise in distributed systems, stream processing, or large-scale data platforms.
Hands-on experience with Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, or Hadoop in production.
Track record of shipping and maintaining critical infrastructure.
Preferred Qualifications: Strong communication skills to concisely and accurately share knowledge with teammates.
Comfortable working in fast-moving, high-stakes environments with minimal guardrails.
Strong debugging, profiling, and performance optimization skills.