Member of Technical Staff - Real-Time Storage

Palo Alto, CA💼 Full-time💰 $180,000–$180,000🗓 2026-05-27 → 2026-09-27

Core

Designing, building, and operating exabyte-scale storage systems and databases to power training, inference, recommendations, and real-time data extraction for a platform serving 600 million users.

Role type

Senior IC storage and database engineer

Builds

Exabyte-scale S3-compatible object store, multi-tenant transactional key/value store, caching tier, scalable vector database

Domain

AI infrastructure, distributed systems, high-performance storage

Deliverable

production ML models | infrastructure

Required skills

C++, Rust, JVM-based languages, distributed systems design, performance optimization, incident response, system reliability

Preferred skills

mentoring, code review, data-driven decision making

Technologies

S3, vector databases, distributed storage systems

Responsibilities

Design and launch new features unifying storage components, resolve performance issues meeting latency/durability requirements, lead incident response and recovery, mentor peers through code and design reviews

Seniority

Senior, hands-on IC

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About xAI

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 emp