Software Engineer - Platform Infrastructure (Rust, C++)
SpaceXAI · Palo Alto, CA
$180,000–$440,000from the description
Jul 19, 2026
Palo Alto, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A systems engineering role focused on building and operating large-scale distributed infrastructure for a major supercomputing cluster used in AI training. Day-to-day work spans low-level performance profiling and optimization across GPUs, Linux kernel, networking, and filesystems, as well as container orchestration with Kubernetes. Best suited to engineers with strong systems programming backgrounds and hands-on experience across the full stack from OS internals to cluster operations.
Senior level · National · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (5)
The job title is not stated in the posting — the company is referred to as 'SpaceXAI' but this appears to be xAI (Elon Musk's AI company); no explicit seniority level is given in the title.
No work location is specified in the posting; CBSA and state fields are left blank. The role is likely on-site at xAI's facilities but this is not confirmed.
C, C++, and Rust are listed together under Basic Qualifications as interchangeable options ('C, C++, or Rust') — emitted as three separate skills each with the others as alternatives, all required.
The very wide compensation band ($180K–$440K) likely spans multiple levels; the posting notes equity and benefits are additional.
Kubernetes is listed as a hard gate in Basic Qualifications with specific sub-requirements (CNI, CSI, service mesh, production-grade ops). All other tools (Linux debugging tools, Helm, GitOps, Docker/containerd/crio, observability stack) appear only under the Preferred Skills section.
Read the full posting
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