xAI

Member of Technical Staff - Multimodal Understanding

xAI
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5 months ago
Palo Alto, CA, USASenior
H1B sponsor

Base Salary

$180k - $440k/yr

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and optimize distributed systems for multimodal pre-training, post-training, inference, data processing, and tokenization at web and petabyte scale.
  • Develop high-throughput pipelines for multimodal data acquisition, preprocessing, filtering, generation, decoding, loading, crawling, visualization, and management.
  • Advance multimodal understanding and generation, including spatial-temporal compression, cross-modal alignment, world modeling, reasoning, agentic behaviors, and real-time processing.
  • Drive human and synthetic data curation, filtering, analysis, and scalable quality pipelines for trillion-parameter models.
  • Create evaluation frameworks, internal benchmarks, reward models, and metrics for real-world usage, failure modes, interactive dynamics, and human-AI collaboration.
  • Innovate on algorithms, modeling approaches, hardware/software/algorithm co-design, and scaling paradigms.
  • Build research tooling, user interfaces, prototypes, demos, full-stack applications, and interactive real-time experiences.
  • Work across pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and post-training to enable reasoning, tool calling, agentic behaviors, orchestration, and real-time interaction.
  • Collaborate with pre-training, post-training, reasoning, data, applied, and product teams.

Requirements

  • Hands-on experience with multimodal pre-training, post-training, or fine-tuning involving vision, audio, video, or cross-modal systems.
  • Expert-level Python proficiency and strong experience with at least one of JAX, PyTorch, or XLA.
  • A proven track record building or optimizing large-scale distributed machine-learning systems, including training or inference optimization, GPU utilization, multi-GPU or TPU setups, or hardware co-design.
  • Deep experience designing and running large-scale data pipelines for curation, filtering, generation, and quality studies involving noisy or real-world multimodal data.
  • Strong fundamentals in evaluation design, benchmarks, reward modeling, or reinforcement-learning techniques, particularly for interactive or agentic behaviors.
  • Experience leading major improvements in model capabilities through data, modeling, algorithms, or scaling is preferred.
  • Familiarity with multimodal LLMs, scaling laws, tokenizers, compression techniques, reasoning, or agentic systems is preferred.
  • Rust and/or C++ proficiency for performance-critical components is preferred.
  • Experience with large-scale orchestration tools such as Spark, Ray, or Kubernetes is preferred.
  • Experience building full-stack tooling, performant interfaces, real-time research demos or applications, or end-to-end products is preferred.
  • Strong communication, initiative, prioritization, and ownership are expected.

Benefits

  • Equity compensation is included in the total rewards package.
  • Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage are provided.
  • Access to a 401(k) retirement plan is provided.
  • Short- and long-term disability insurance are provided.
  • Life insurance and various discounts and perks are available.
xAI

About xAI

1,001-5,000 employees

Understand the Universe. We are a team of AI technologists and business leaders on a mission to build AI systems that can help humanity understand the world better. https://x.ai/careers

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