Sr. Software Engineer, Training/Inference (C++)
xAI
Palo Alto, CA · $220k–$357k a year · Posted November 5, 2026
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Where Palo Alto, CA ranks
Where Palo Alto, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #3Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills28% · of 100
- #3Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast28% · of 54
- #3Best cities for AI-skill jobs37% · of 100
- #3Best cities for AI-skill jobs in the West Coast37% · of 71
- #4Best cities for data and analytics pay after cost of living$207k · of 28
- #4Best all-round cities for mid-career professionals83 / 100 · of 100
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
Pay compared with the market
This listing pays about $288,500 a year. Across 28 open sr. software engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $169,000 to $217,500 and the median is $182,500. That is 58% above the median, above the middle half of those listings.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
Sr. Software Engineer salaries by state · Check your own pay
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
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About the job
SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today, SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary and expanding consciousness to the stars.
SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe. Our teams are building the full Super Intelligence stack: from our Colossus supercomputers, to Grok models, to our suite of applications, including Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X. We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next.
SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER, TRAINING/INFERENCE (C++)
At SpaceXSI we are building the high-performance inference platform that serves Grok to millions of users every day. As a Software Engineer, Training/Inference (C++), you will design and optimize large-scale model serving systems end-to-end. You will own everything from distributed infrastructure – global KV cache, continuous batching, load balancing, auto-scaling – to deep low-level optimizations, including GPU kernels, quantization, speculative decoding, and tail latency. This is a high-impact role where your work directly determines how fast and reliably users interact with Grok at massive scale.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Architect and implement scalable distributed infrastructure for model serving (load balancing, auto-scaling, batch scheduling, global KV cache)
Optimize latency and throughput of model inference under real production workloads
Build and operate high-concurrency serving systems with excellent tail latency and high reliability at the scale required to serve millions of users
Benchmark, fine-tune, and accelerate inference engines (including low-level GPU kernel work and code generation)
Develop custom tools to trace, replay, and fix issues across the full stack — from orchestration down to GPU kernels
Create robust CI/CD infrastructure for seamless endpoint deployment, image publishing, and inference engine updates
Accelerate research on scaling test-time compute, RL rollout, and model-hardware co-design for next-generation systems
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or science discipline
5+ years of experience with low-level system programming experience in C/C++ or Rust
PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:
Experience with large-scale, high-concurrent production serving
Experience with GPU inference engines (e.g., vLLM, SGLang, Triton, TensorRT-LLM)
Strong background in system optimizations: batching, caching, load balancing, parallelism
Low-level inference optimizations: GPU kernels, code generation
Algorithmic inference optimizations: quantization, speculative decoding, distillation, low-precision numerics
Experience with testing, benchmarking, and reliability of inference services
Experience designing and implementing CI/CD infrastructure for inference
COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:
$220,000 - $357,000 USD
Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at SpaceXSI , 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.
SpaceXSI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice .