Six Figure Work

Model Engineer, Post-Training & RL

xAI

Company websitex.ai (xAI, opens in new tab)

Base salary $180K  to $400K

Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in Palo Alto, CA

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  • LocationPalo Alto, CA
  • WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (24 min ago) · observed since

About this 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.

MODEL ENGINEER, POST-TRAINING & RL

You will work on the most critical post-training and reinforcement learning challenges at any given time — including reward modeling, preference optimization (RLHF/DPO), and RL for improving reasoning, truthfulness, and real-world capabilities.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Design and run rigorous experiments that turn research ideas into measurable gains in model capability
  • Improve model recipes through data quality, deduplication, and mixture experiments
  • Define what makes RL data and rewards good, including grader design and preventing reward hacking
  • Advance training science, from architecture and scaling experiments to post-training recipes for coding and computer-use agents
  • Build evals and targeted tasks that expose model weaknesses and guide where the team invests next
  • Partner with engineers to take promising results from small experiments to frontier-scale training runs

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

  • Experience writing production-quality code in Python, PyTorch, JAX, Rust, or C++

PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

  • You believe truth-seeking AI is the most important and challenging problem
  • You are obsessed about building incredibly useful models through post-training and RL techniques
  • You are a power user of AI models and eager to push the boundaries of what’s possible with reinforcement learning and alignment methods
  • If you previously worked on post-training, RLHF, or trained models used by millions of people it’s a big plus, but relevant experience is not required
  • You take pride in your work and thrive in meritocratic environments

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:

$180,000 - $400,000 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.

Source: xAI on Greenhouse · View original posting (opens in new tab)

This range next to 6 other live xAI roles with the nearest advertised base floor
Chart as a table
This range next to 6 other live xAI roles with the nearest advertised base floor
RolePublished base
Model Engineer, Post-Training & RL (this listing)$180K - $400K
Model Engineer, Imagine$180K - $440K
Software Engineer, Real-Time Storage$180K - $390K
Software Engineer, Consumer Subscriptions$180K - $440K
Web Engineer (X)$180K - $440K
Software Engineer, Imagine Product$180K - $440K
Software Engineer, Linux Kernel$180K - $440K

Same $100K to $400K scale as every card. All xAI roles · How to read the bar

Observed changes

  1. First observed on the employer's board
  2. fields changed
  3. fields changed
  4. fields changed
  5. Began meeting the published-salary criteria
  6. Advertised base range changed
Observed since
Employer-stated posting date
2026-04-29
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: Palo Alto, CA

$180,000 - $400,000 USD

Method
Employer text, read with fixed rules and re-verified
Checked
Rule set
us-base-v2

The pay passage appears in the employer's own job text. Fixed, deterministic rules located it, and the passage below was checked against the stored copy of the posting.

What we verified

  • The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
  • The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
  • The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.

We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.