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AI/HPC Network Development Engineer - xAI Networking

Memphis, TN

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 engineers and researchers are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.

About the Role

xAI was first in the world to build a 100k GPU cluster on an ethernet network and then did it again in 92 days, floors, walls and all. We need an engineer with deep experience in RoCEv2 that can develop at hyper scale while optimizing performance and availability. 

xAI is building at a furious pace with the latest hardware to help people understand the universe. To make the next significant leap forward, we need to own our own destiny by understanding our current network performance and availability and then optimize it to our training models and how we execute customer inference queries. You will spend most of your days deep inside  NCCL, building metric dashboards and tweaking configurations to ensure no performance is left on the table. You will help design the next iteration of our backend and front-end networks that will allow us to seamlessly build-out new GPU infrastructure with little to no engineering assistance.  

There will be a significant amount of travel to Memphis for building more capacity as well as participating in a team on-call rotation and helping on other scaling and maintenance efforts. This will become easier as we build out the team and engineers contribute to deployment and operations frameworks to remove repetitive tasks.

Location

We have 2 openings, one based in Palo Alto, California and the other in Dublin, Ireland. There will be significant travel expected to Memphis, Tennessee for data center buildouts and to the head office in Palo Alto for team collaboration.

Ideal Experiences

  • A minimum of 10 years designing and operating large scale networks with 5 years in the ethernet AI/HPC space.
  • Deep understanding of congestion control on ethernet with Infiniband an added bonus.
  • Deep understanding of AI training and inference workloads and how they operate on the network. As part of this you are able to use and debug NCCL and potentially commit to the library.
  • Expertise in creating a portfolio of metrics for performance and operations to optimize the fleet for training and inference traffic.
  • Experience with Python to automate away repetitive tasks and facilitate your daily job working with and analyzing large sets of data.

Interview Process

After submitting your application, the team reviews your CV and statement of exceptional work. If your application passes this stage, you will be invited to an initial interview (45 minutes - 1 hour) during which a member of our team will ask some basic questions. If you clear the initial phone interview, you will enter the main process, which consists of five interviews:

  1. Coding assessment in a language of your choice.
  2. Data center network technologies and RoCEv2.
  3. Manager Interview.
  4. Presentation of a large scale solution you owned, start to finish.
  5. Meet and greet with the wider team.

xAI is an equal opportunity employer and does not unlawfully discriminate based on race, color, religion, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, disability, medical conditions, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics. 

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

xAI reasonably believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: 

  • Access to information technology systems and confidential information, including proprietary and trade secret information, and/or user data;
  • Interacting with internal and/or external clients and colleagues; and
  • Exercising sound judgment.

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