Machine Learning Engineer - Frontier Data - Starfleet

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 team

The post-training team at xAI transforms powerful pre-trained models to become steerable, versatile, and capable of understanding and addressing real-world challenges.

But the model is only as intelligent as the data it’s trained on, and you will be responsible for the educational diet of Grok as well as evaluating its capabilities. You will enhance the model's instruction-following capability and general usefulness to fulfill our mission – developing AI systems that can accurately understand the universe, create new knowledge, and improve themselves through interactions. You will improve Grok’s capabilities on coding, mathematical reasoning, science, law, and many other domains.

About the role

In this role you will:

• Create and drive training data optimizations to advance model quality.


• Improve data mixtures to drive model behavior improvements.


• Design and implement robust model evaluations.


• Build tools to benchmark, evaluate, and boost our models’ reasoning and performance.


• Collaborate with pre-training, reasoning, data, multimodal, applied, product efforts to push the frontiers of model capability.

Exceptional candidates may have:

• Expertise in ML and fine-tuning large language models.


• Experience working on large-scale recommendation models or other predictive systems.


• Experience in data-driven large language model behavior improvements.


• Experience in developing benchmarks or large-scale distributed machine learning systems.


• Experience in model optimizations under complex setups (e.g., multi-modality, multi-context, multi-agent, long-horizon tasks, diverse user preference/feedback).

Tech Stack

• Python


• Jax

Location

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

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. 2x post-training technical sessions: These sessions will be testing your ability to formulate, design and solve concrete problems in training data for post-training.


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

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.