AI Engineer & Researcher - RL Training Framework

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 Team

Reasoning infrastructure team at xAI builds an end to end RL training framework to enable pretrain scale RL.

About the Role

In this role you might:

• Design and implement state-of-the-art distributed RL systems
• Profile, debug, and optimize system performance
• Software and algorithm co-design with researchers

Ideal Experience

• Experience building, debugging, and optimizing large scale distributed training systems
• Experience building async RL training frameworks
• Experience in inference systems
• Proficiency in Python, Jax, or Rust

Exceptional candidates may have:

• PhD with AI or other scientific domains
• Strong knowledge of reinforcement learning techniques
• Experience building infra for large-scale reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning

Location

• We hire engineers in Palo Alto. Our team usually works from the office 5 days a week but allow work-from-home days when required. Candidates are expected to be located near Palo Alto or open to relocation.

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:

1. Coding assessment in a language of your choice.
2. Researcher technical sessions (2): These sessions will be testing your ability to formulate, design and solve concrete problems in real world with LLM. It can be research or engineering, depending on background/experience.
3. 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

xAI is an equal opportunity employer.

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