Member of Technical Staff - Multimodal Tokenization

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

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.

Tech Stack

• Python
• JAX and XLA
• Rust / C++
• Spark / Ray

Location

The role is based in the Bay Area [Palo Alto]. Candidates are expected to be located near the Bay Area or open to relocation.

Focus

• Training multimodal tokenizers at the web scale for unified interface with multimodal language models.
• Pushing boundaries in spatial-temporal compression, world modeling, multimodal reasoning, cross-modal alignment, and emergent capabilities.
• Rapidly implementing the latest state-of-the-art methods from the deep learning literature.
• Innovating new ideas for pretraining and new scaling paradigm.

Ideal Experiences (at least one from below)

• Strong engineering skills with passion on model-hardware co-design
• Expert in ML and large model scaling, familiar with all kinds of scaling laws.
• Familiar with distributed training, multi-GPU neural network training and experience on optimizing ML training efficiency.
• Familiar with state-of-the-art techniques for multimodal tokenizers, especially image, video and audio.

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 a 15-minute interview (“phone interview”) 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 four technical interviews:

1. Coding assessment in a language of your choice.
2. Technical sessions (2-3)
3. Meet the Team: Present your past exceptional work and your vision with xAI to a small audience.

Our goal is to finish the main process within one week. All interviews will be conducted via Google Meet.

Annual Salary Range

$180,000 - $440,000 USD

Benefits

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.

xAI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice.