Backend Engineer - API

<div class="content-intro"><h3><strong><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ABOUT xAI</span></strong></h3> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">xAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organization is for individuals who appreciate challenging themselves and thrive on curiosity. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">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. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">All employees are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.</span></p></div><h3 data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ABOUT THE ROLE:</span></h3> <p>As an ideal candidate you have a good understanding of how highly scalable and reliable production infrastructure is built. Most of our backend infrastructure is written in Rust. So familiarity with a compiled language such as C++, Rust, or Go is highly beneficial.</p> <h3><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">RESPONSIBILITIES:</span></h3> <ul> <li>Build the xAI API that serves our models to developers worldwide</li> <li>Own the end-to-end system responsible for high-throughput inference, handling billions of tokens per minute with low latency and high availability, including model serving infrastructure, request routing, SDK development, rate limiting, observability, and efficient scaling</li> </ul> <h3><span style="f