Software Engineer, Observability
xAI is hiring a Software Engineer, Observability in Palo Alto, United States. It pays $180k-$440k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on xAI.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this software engineer role Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- The listed pay starts 7% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- Level lists 296 other open roles at xAI.
AI in this role
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.
ABOUT THE ROLE:
The Observability team builds and operates the core infrastructure that enables engineers to monitor, debug, and optimize the performance and reliability of their systems. We handle telemetry at massive scale — billions of time series and petabytes of logs — with strict performance and availability requirements.
You will be part of the small, high-impact team responsible for building and maintaining SpaceXSI's observability platform. You’ll own critical systems that power metrics, logs, tracing, and alerting enabling engineering teams to operate services at scale, identify issues before they impact users, and drive systemic reliability improvements.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Design and implement scalable observability infrastructure for metrics, logging, and tracing.
- Build high-performance telemetry pipelines that handle massive ingestion volumes.
- Develop APIs, query engines, and UIs that allow engineers to get real-time insights into their services.
- Define and enforce best practices for instrumentation, alerting, and reliability across the company.
- Partner with infrastructure and product teams to deeply integrate observability into our internal platforms.
- Own the reliability, scalability, and performance of the observability stack end-to-end.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:
- Production-level proficiency in Go, Rust, Scala, or a similar languages
- Deep understanding of distributed systems and telemetry architecture.
- Experience building and operating infrastructure at scale.
- Familiarity with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, VictoriaMetrics, or ClickHouse.
- Experience with Kafka, Redis, or large-scale time series databases.
- Experience operating observability pipelines in Kubernetes or similar orchestration environments.
COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:
$180,000 - $440,000 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, Observability at xAI rates 63 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.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ 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.
Pay
- This job starts at
- $180k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 7% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
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