Member of Technical Staff - Compute Infrastructure

xAI
Palo Alto, CA / Seattle, WA / Palo Alto, CA, Palo Alto, California, United States2026-03-06

About the job

We are building one of the world’s largest AI supercomputers from the ground up. As part of the Compute Infrastructure team, you will own both the raw GPU supercomputer and the platform layer that runs on top of it. You will work across the full stack — from low-level GPU kernel optimizations and Linux kernel internals to massive-scale orchestration and virtualization — to make training and inference at xAI as fast, reliable, and scalable as possible. This is a broad, high-impact role that combines hardcore supercompute and compute infrastructure work. Your contributions will directly accelerate Grok’s training speed and overall AI progress.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and optimize massive GPU clusters for extreme-scale training and inference workloads

Develop and tune low-level CUDA kernels (GeMM, Attention, etc.), using CUTLASS, Tensor Cores, and Nsight for maximum performance

Work on Linux kernel internals, scheduling, memory management, and resource isolation at cluster scale

Build custom container orchestration, virtualization layers (KVM, Firecracker, etc.), and distributed systems that go beyond standard Kubernetes

Profile, debug, and eliminate bottlenecks across GPU memory hierarchy, networking fabric, filesystems, and multi-GPU operations

Create and maintain infrastructure-as-code, automation, and tools that keep the entire supercomputer reliable and efficient

Collaborate closely with AI research teams to deliver production-grade performance and scalability

Qualifications

Minimum

No minimum qualifications listed.

Preferred

Deep low-level systems programming (C/C++ or Rust)

Experience building and operating high performance exabyte scale storage systems

Strong experience with large-scale GPU clusters or distributed compute infrastructure at production scale

Hands-on work with GPU kernel optimization (CUTLASS, custom kernels, Nsight profiling)

Experience with Linux kernel internals, scheduling, virtualization, or large-scale orchestration

Track record of building or running high-performance infrastructure for AI workloads (training or inference platforms)

Ability to reason from first principles and optimize for both memory-bound and compute-bound scenarios