Member of Technical Staff - Imagine Product

ABOUT xAI xAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organization is for individuals who appreciate challenging themselves and thrive on curiosity. We operate with a flat organizational structure. All employees are expected to be hands-on and to contribute directly to the company’s mission. Leadership is given to those who show initiative and consistently deliver excellence. Work ethic and strong prioritization skills are important. All employees are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates. ABOUT THE ROLE: The Imagine Product team is redefining AI-driven media experiences for Grok users worldwide. In this role, you’ll build and scale robust, high-performance systems that power immersive, multi-modal media interactions—leveraging cutting-edge AI to enable seamless generation, processing, and delivery of images, video, audio, and beyond. Your work will drive engaging, real-time user experiences that captivate and delight millions, turning advanced multimodal models into production-grade features. If you’re a driven problem-solver passionate about AI, media technologies, and creating scalable solutions that shape the future of consumer AI, this is your opportunity to make a lasting impact. RESPONSIBILITIES: Design and implement scalable systems to support Grok's AI-driven media experiences, ensuring high performance, reliability, and low-latency at global scale. Architect robust infrastructure for real-time multi-modal interactions, including handling generation requests, media processing, and seamless integration with frontend and model serving layers. Build and optimize large-scale data pipelines to ingest, process, and analyze multi-modal data (images, video, audio), fueling continuous improvement and personalization of Grok's media capabilities. Collaborate closely with frontend engineers, AI researchers, and product teams to deliver captivating, media-rich features and end-to-end user experiences. Own full-cycle development of solutions: from system design and prototyping to deployment, monitoring, observability, and iterative refinement. Deliver production-ready, maintainable code that powers features reaching hundreds of millions of users. BASIC QUALIFICATIONS: Proficiency in Python or Rust, with a strong track record of writing clean, efficient, maintainable, and scalable code. Experience designing and building systems for consumer-facing products, with emphasis on performance, reliability, and handling high-throughput workloads. Hands-on expertise in large-scale data infrastructure and pipelines, particularly for multi-modal or media-heavy AI applications. Proven ability to deliver robust, production-grade solutions to millions of users while maintaining high standards of quality and uptime. Strong problem-solving skills and a passion for turning innovative ideas into high-impact, scalable realities. Deep enthusiasm for AI and media technologies, with a commitment to building user-focused products that inspire and engage. PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE: Experience with real-time systems, inference serving, or multi-modal data processing at scale. Familiarity with distributed systems, containerization (e.g., Kubernetes), observability tools, or performance tuning for AI workloads. Background in AI-driven consumer products or media generation technologies. Track record collaborating across engineering, research, and product teams to ship delightful features quickly. COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS: $180,000 - $440,000 USD Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at xAI, 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 di