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xAI

Software Engineer, Imagine Safety

xAI is hiring a Software Engineer, Imagine Safety in New York, Palo Alto and San Francisco, United States. It pays $140k-$225k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on xAI.

Level's read on this job

  • Works on AI ●●●○ is how Level rates this software engineer role: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
  • The posting mentions AI safety among its tools and skills.
  • Level classes it as a mid-level role.
  • xAI has 302 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

ai-safety

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.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER, IMAGINE SAFETY

The Imagine team is redefining AI-driven media experiences for Grok users worldwide. As a Product Safety Engineer on the Imagine team, you will build the critical safety systems and infrastructure that ensure Grok’s multimodal generation capabilities (images, video, audio, and beyond) are powerful, delightful, and responsibly deployed. You’ll design and scale safeguards, detection systems, and evaluation frameworks that prevent harm while preserving creativity and user freedom. Your work will directly shape how millions of users experience generative media — balancing rapid innovation with rigorous safety, trustworthiness, and alignment with SpaceXSI's mission.

If you’re a driven engineer passionate about AI safety, content integrity, and building robust systems that protect users without stifling innovation, this is your opportunity to make a lasting impact at the frontier of multimodal AI.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Design and implement scalable safety systems for Grok’s media generation platform, including real-time content moderation, risk detection, and safeguard enforcement for images, video, and audio
  • Build infrastructure to measure, monitor, and mitigate safety risks such as harmful content, bias, deepfakes, intellectual property issues, and misuse at global scale
  • Develop tools, pipelines, and evaluation frameworks that enable rapid iteration on safety policies in collaboration with researchers, product, and policy teams
  • Architect robust feedback loops between user interactions, model outputs, and training data to continuously improve safety while maintaining high performance and low latency
  • Own full-cycle development of safety features: from problem definition and prototyping to deployment, monitoring, incident response, and long-term refinement
  • Partner closely with the Imagine engineering, research, and product teams to embed safety into core features and deliver delightful yet responsible user experiences

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

  • 2+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping user-facing products

PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

  • Proficiency in Rust, with a strong track record of writing clean, efficient, maintainable, and scalable code
  • Experience designing and building production safety, trust & safety, or content moderation systems for consumer-facing products at scale
  • Hands-on expertise developing real-time detection systems, data pipelines, or evaluation frameworks for high-throughput AI applications
  • Proven ability to deliver robust, reliable solutions that reach millions of users while maintaining high standards of uptime and performance
  • Strong problem-solving skills and a passion for turning complex safety challenges into practical, high-impact engineering solutions
  • Deep enthusiasm for responsible AI development and a commitment to building systems that advance humanity’s understanding while protecting users
  • Experience with multimodal content safety (images, video, audio) or generative AI safety in production environments
  • Familiarity with machine learning classifiers, safety evaluation, red-teaming, or adversarial testing for media generation models
  • Background in distributed systems, real-time inference serving, Kubernetes, observability tools, or large-scale data infrastructure
  • Track record collaborating across engineering, research, and policy teams to ship safety-critical features quickly and effectively
  • Previous work on content moderation, anti-abuse, model alignment, or responsible AI at consumer AI products

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS:

  • Onsite role: must be able to work in person at our office locations in Palo Alto, San Francisco, or New York

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:

$140,000 - $225,000 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.

How we rate this

Software Engineer, Imagine Safety at xAI rates 69 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI Safety

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$140k
Typical software engineer job
$167k

This posting starts 16% below the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you think about the risk of an AI system in this kind of role failing silently?
  2. Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
  3. If you removed AI from this role, what would be left, and how do you decide what still needs a human?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI Safety. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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