Storage Systems Engineer - Supercomputing

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

About the Role

As a Storage Systems Engineer on xAI’s Supercomputing team, you will design, build, and optimize high-performance storage systems to support some of the world’s largest GPU supercomputing clusters. These clusters power both AI training workloads and inference, requiring extreme reliability, scalability, and low-latency data access.

Focus

• Architect and implement distributed storage solutions tailored for massive AI workloads, ensuring seamless integration with compute infrastructure.
• Optimize storage performance for high-throughput and low-latency access, leveraging cutting-edge hardware (NVMe, SSD) and software (Ceph, ZFS).
• Collaborate with infrastructure teams to enhance deployment pipelines using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) best practices, ensuring robust and secure storage delivery.
• Monitor and maintain storage systems across on-premise clusters and cloud environments, proactively addressing bottlenecks and failures.
• Contribute to capacity planning and data durability strategies to support xAI’s growing computational needs.

Ideal Experience

• Designing and operating distributed storage systems (e.g., Ceph, Lustre, or ZFS) at scale for high-performance computing (HPC) or AI workloads.
• Hands-on experience with storage hardware (NVMe, SSD, HDD) and tuning I/O performance in compute-intensive environments.
• Writing scalable, high-performance code in Rust or Go for storage-related applications or tooling.
• Managing storage infrastructure with IaC tools like Pulumi, Terraform, or Ansible.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes storage primitives (e.g., Persistent Volumes, CSI drivers) and integrating storage with containerized workloads.
• Bonus: Experience with AI/ML data pipelines, including handling large datasets for training and inference.

Tech Stack

• Kubernetes
• Pulumi
• Rust and Go
• Ceph, ZFS, Minio, S3, GCS, or similar distributed storage systems
• NVMe, SSD, and HDD storage technologies

Annual Salary Range

$180,000 - $440,000 USD

xAI is an equal opportunity employer and does not unlawfully discriminate based on race, color, religion, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, disability, medical conditions, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics. 

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

xAI reasonably believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: 

• Access to information technology systems and confidential information, including proprietary and trade secret information, and/or user data;
• Interacting with internal and/or external clients and colleagues; and
• Exercising sound judgment.

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