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

About the Team

The pre-training data team at xAI is dedicated to crafting the ultimate data recipe for training the best models that power all downstream applications from chatbot, coding to agents. In particular, we believe data is the core for intelligence and we aim to understand everything about pretraining data and the science behind it.

Tech Stack

• Python

• Rust

• Spark

• Ray

Location

The role is based in the Bay Area San Francisco and Palo Alto. Candidates are expected to be located near the Bay Area or open to relocation.

In this role, you will:

• Collaborate with the crawling team to discover and source datasets.

• Architect pipelines to transform datasets at petabyte scales with efficiency and precision.

• Craft insightful experiments to assess dataset quality and impact on model training.

• Design careful control experiments to understand the data and data pipeline.

• Innovate the recipe for scaling pre-training data to new frontiers.

Exceptional candidates may have:

• First-principles thinking — the ability to think deeply and question every assumption rather than accepting the status quo.

• Expertise in ML and large model scaling, with familiarity across all kinds of scaling laws.

• Strong ability to design ML experiments.

• Knowledge of state-of-the-art techniques for curating pre-training data.

• Strong engineering abilities in Spark, Ray, and other frameworks for large-scale data processing.

Interview Process

After submitting your application, the team reviews your CV and statement of exceptional work. If your application passes this stage, you will be invited to a 15-minute interview (“phone interview”) during which a member of our team will ask some basic questions. If you clear the initial phone interview, you will enter the main process, which consists of four technical interviews:

• Coding assessment in a language of your choice.

• Technical sessions (2): These sessions will be testing your ability to formulate, design and solve concrete problems in real world with LLM.

• Meet the Team: Present your past exceptional work and your vision with xAI to a small audience.

Our goal is to finish the main process within one week. All interviews will be conducted via Google Meet.

Annual Salary Range

$180,000 - $440,000 USD

Benefits

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

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