About this role
Summary: Build and operate core platform systems for ML researchers and product engineers, focusing on distributed systems, infrastructure, and reliability. Partner with research to turn pain points into durable infrastructure while shipping platform primitives in a high-ownership environment.
SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today, SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary and expanding consciousness to the stars.
SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe. Our teams are building the full Super Intelligence stack: from our Colossus supercomputers, to Grok models, to our suite of applications, including Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X. We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next.
SOFTWARE ENGINEER, ML PLATFORM
As a Software Engineer on ML Platform at SpaceXSI, you'll build the infrastructure that turns real product usage into better models, and keeps research moving fast on large GPU fleets. ML Platform is organized into four teams. Depending on your background, you may join any of them. We're looking for strong distributed-systems and infrastructure engineers who want to sit next to research and ship platform primitives that move the product.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Design, build, and operate core platform systems used daily by ML researchers and product engineers
- Partner closely with research to turn recurring pain into durable infrastructure
- Own reliability, performance, and developer experience for the systems in your lane
- Ship iteratively in a flat, high-ownership environment. Measure impact, then raise the bar
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in computer science, machine learning, or another quantitative discipline; OR equivalent work experience
- 5+ years of industry experience working with production distributed systems (e.g., infrastructure, ingestion, data pipelines, or scheduling/orchestration, etc.)
PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:
- Experience owning production distributed systems at meaningful scale (ingestion, data pipelines, scheduling/orchestration, or similar)
- Experience partnering and building platforms for ML researchers and product engineers
- Thrive where ownership is high and the feedback loop is short
- Telemetry: event ingestion, product analytics pipelines, OpenTelemetry / tracing, reliable data APIs
- Product Data Platform: data frameworks, Spark / Flink / Ray, ML dataset and training-data infrastructure
- Observability: experiment / run monitoring, debug and eval tooling, agent-friendly observability UX
- ML DevX and Systems: GPU / cluster scheduling, job queues, node health, research compute developer experience
ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS:
- We're in-person with cozy offices in North Beach, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Manhattan, New York, complete with well-stocked libraries
- If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach out to schedule 2-3 short technicals. After, we'll schedule an onsite in our office, where you'll work on a small project, discuss ideas, and meet the team
COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:
The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.
Annual Salary:
$140,000 - $225,000 USD
Your actual level and base salary will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: job-related knowledge and skills, education, and experience.
Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at SpaceXSI, 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.