Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure

xAI xAI · AI Frontier · Palo Alto, CA · Engineering

Software Engineer focused on designing and building scalable, high-performance search infrastructure, including real-time indexing, serving, and data pipelines. The role involves operating production services end-to-end, leading incident responses, and shaping the technical direction of core search infrastructure. Requires proficiency in high-performance languages like Rust, C++, or JVM-based languages, and hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design and build large scale search infrastructure (real-time indexing, serving, and data pipelines) that handles massive write and query loads with strict latency and reliability requirements
  2. Go deep into search internals (indexing, query execution, and relevance) and help shape the technical direction of the core search infrastructure
  3. Operate production services end to end, including monitoring, debugging, incident response, and performance optimization
  4. Lead and drive incident responses and recovery with your peers. Review and contribute to incident postmortems and hold a high bar for the same

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems or experience with storage or hardware architecture
  • Proficient in high performance Rust, C++ or JVM-based languages
  • Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies (Elasticsearch, Lucene, or similar) and an understanding of how they work and why
  • Experience with operating system internals, filesystems, networking, or database storage engines
  • Obsessed performance, reliability, scalability and quality
  • Ability to take full ownership of problems and learn whatever is needed to solve them
  • Comfortable moving quickly in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities and tight deadlines

Nice to have

  • Contributions to open-source search or infrastructure projects

What the JD emphasized

  • 5+ years developing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems or experience with storage or hardware architecture
  • Obsessed performance, reliability, scalability and quality
  • Ability to take full ownership of problems and learn whatever is needed to solve them