Sr. Software Engineer, Real-Time Storage
Company websitex.ai (xAI, opens in new tab)
Base salary $180K to $330K
Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in Palo Alto, CA
You apply on the employer's own site. Six Figure Work does not handle applications.
- LocationPalo Alto, CA
- WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
- Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
- Last checked (3 h 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.
SR. SOFTWARE ENGINEER, REAL-TIME STORAGE
We’re looking for exceptional storage & database engineers who want to join us on a new project to deeply integrate SpaceXSI's advanced AI infrastructure into a platform used by around 600 million users every month. We’re building a new storage tier that powers training, inference, recommendations, and real-time data extraction.
We build and operate an exabyte-scale S3-compatible object store, a multi-tenant transactional key/value store that serves 100s of millions requests per second, a caching tier that serves billions of requests per second, scalable vector database that powers our recommendation systems, and a few other specialized databases serving hundreds of millions requests per second.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Design, build, and launch to production new features and improvements aimed at unifying common components across the storage systems
- Dive into performance issues and work with customers and deliver solutions to cater to customers’ latency, availability and data durability requirements
- Lead and drive incident responses and recovery with your peers
- Review and contribute to incident postmortems and hold a high bar for the same
- Work in a collaborative environment and up-level your peers by doing mentoring and code and design reviews
- Develop new skills and learn on the job as we navigate new technology spaces
- Ground your decisions with data and reasoning and adapt to new information to make informed choices
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, math, or technical discipline; OR 5+ years of experience in software development building storage systems or databases in lieu of a degree
- Experience with high-performance C++, Rust, or JVM-based languages
PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:
- 7+ years of experience in software development building storage systems or databases
- Obsessed with reliability, performance, and quality
- Expertise in building, running, and operating scalable and resilient distributed systems
COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:
$180,000 - $330,000 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)
Pay in context
This role's base floor ($180,000) is above 51% of the 4,268 Software Engineering roles in California listed on this site; 176 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $176,050; the middle half runs from $149,100 to $204,000.
Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 7, 2026.
This listingSr. Software Engineer, Real-Time Storage$180K to $330K
Sr. Software Engineer, Consumer Subscriptions$180K to $330K
Sr. Web Engineer (X)$180K to $330K
Sr. Software Engineer, Observability$180K to $330K
Sr. Software Engineer, Platform Infrastructure$180K to $330K
Sr. Maching Learning Engineer, Search Ranking$180K to $330K
Sr. Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation Systems$180K to $330K
Chart as a table
| Role | Published base |
|---|---|
| Sr. Software Engineer, Real-Time Storage (this listing) | $180K - $330K |
| Sr. Software Engineer, Consumer Subscriptions | $180K - $330K |
| Sr. Web Engineer (X) | $180K - $330K |
| Sr. Software Engineer, Observability | $180K - $330K |
| Sr. Software Engineer, Platform Infrastructure | $180K - $330K |
| Sr. Maching Learning Engineer, Search Ranking | $180K - $330K |
| Sr. Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation Systems | $180K - $330K |
Observed changes
- First observed on the employer's board
- fields changed
- Began meeting the published-salary criteria
- Advertised base range changed
- Advertised base range changed
- fields changed
- Observed since
- Employer-stated posting date
- 2025-07-30
Where this pay comes from
Location as the employer wrote it: Palo Alto, CA
$180,000 - $330,000 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.
