# Backend Engineer - API

**Company**: xAI
**Location**: Palo Alto, CA
**Work arrangement**: onsite
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $180,000 - $440,000 USD
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology
**Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q120599684

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/xai/jobs/5119111007
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_af19433f-b93

## Description

### About the Role

As a Backend Engineer - API at xAI, you will play a crucial role in building the xAI API that serves our models to developers worldwide. You will own the end-to-end system responsible for high-throughput inference, handling billions of tokens per minute with low latency and high availability, including model serving infrastructure, request routing, SDK development, rate limiting, observability, and efficient scaling.

### Responsibilities

- Build the xAI API that serves our models to developers worldwide

- Own the end-to-end system responsible for high-throughput inference, handling billions of tokens per minute with low latency and high availability, including model serving infrastructure, request routing, SDK development, rate limiting, observability, and efficient scaling

### Basic Qualifications

- Expert knowledge of either Rust or C++

- Experience in designing, implementing, and maintaining reliable and horizontally scalable distributed systems

- Knowledge of service observability and reliability best practices

- Experience in operating commonly used databases such as PostgreSQL, Clickhouse, and MongoDB

### Preferred Skills and Experience

- Experience with LLM inference engines and serving frameworks (e.g., SGLang, TensorRT, vLLM)

- Experience designing or building with agent SDKs and agent orchestration frameworks

- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and containerized applications

- Expert knowledge of gRPC (unary, response streaming, bi-directional streaming, REST mapping)

### 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 discounts and perks.

## Skills

### Required
- Rust
- C++
- Distributed Systems
- Service Observability
- Database Management

### Nice to have
- LLM Inference Engines
- Agent SDKs
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- gRPC