Member of Technical Staff, Reasoning (Alignment)

xAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organization is for individuals who appreciate challenging themselves and thrive on curiosity. 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. All engineers are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.

About the Role

xAI is seeking talented engineers to ensure that our AI systems are maximally beneficial for society. In this role, you will work on designing and developing safety-related behaviors of our frontier AI systems across all stages of model development.

Focus

Candidates for this role may focus on one or more of the following:

• Training Grok to act in accordance with its design, even under adverse situations
• Quantifying and reducing deceptive, sycophantic, and power-seeking behaviors
• Developing novel reasoning training recipes to achieve alignment objectives
• Building ecologically valid benchmarks to assess agentic propensities and capabilities

Ideal experience

The ideal candidate:

• has strong software engineering skills,
• isn’t afraid to look through data by hand,
• is a team player and willing to pick up new skills to get the job done.

Location

• We hire engineers in Palo Alto. Our team usually works from the office 5 days a week but allow work-from-home days when required. Candidates are expected to be located near Palo Alto or open to relocation.

Interview Process

After submitting your application, the team reviews your CV and statement of exceptional work. If your application passes this stage, you will be invited to a 15 minute interview (“phone interview”) during which a member of our team will ask some basic questions. If you clear the initial phone interview, you will enter the main process, which consists of four technical interviews:

1. Coding assessment in a language of your choice.
2. Technical sessions (2): These sessions will be testing your ability to formulate, design and solve concrete problems in real world with LLM.
3. Meet the Team: Present your past exceptional work and your vision with xAI to a small audience.

Our goal is to finish the main process within one week. All interviews will be conducted via Google Meet.

Annual Salary Range

$180,000 - $440,000 USD

Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at xAI, 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.

xAI is an equal opportunity employer.

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