About this role
Engineers who thrive in high-consequence industrial or high-performance computing environments will find a natural fit at xAI. Operating out of the Memphis and Southaven campus, the infrastructure team designs the monitoring, observability, and physical-digital guardrails that keep massive AI training clusters running smoothly. This group connects the physical realities of power, cooling, and compute with software-driven telemetry to minimize downtime and streamline incident response.
Incoming engineers will shoulder responsibility for campus reliability, commanding cross-discipline security and infrastructure events while treating alert noise as a design flaw rather than an operator error. The flat organizational structure requires everyone to remain hands-on, directly contributing to mission-critical infrastructure through rigorous postmortems, playbook creation, and telemetry design. Ideal candidates bring deep operational experience from complex environments like power plants, nuclear facilities, or large data centers, coupled with the calm leadership required to manage high-pressure outages.
What you will do
- Design and own the monitoring architecture, signal quality, and alert suppression strategies across the campus fleet.
- Provide technical incident leadership and bridge coordination during SEV-class events while maintaining strict severity hygiene.
- Facilitate blameless postmortems and drive corrective actions through to complete resolution rather than leaving them filed away.
- Spearhead cross-functional reliability projects that bridge software domains with physical compute, network, storage, power, and cooling boundaries.
- Maintain up-to-date dependency maps, author operational playbooks, and run regular game days in partnership with the network operations center.
- Participate in active on-call rotations to support mission-critical infrastructure in the Memphis and Southaven data center campus.
What you need
- Hold a bachelor's degree in Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or possess equivalent professional experience.
- Bring at least 5 years of hands-on background in site reliability, systems engineering, plant operations, or large-scale production environments.
- Demonstrate prior large-scale incident command experience along with calm technical leadership during high-pressure bridge calls.
- Show proven design capabilities in fleet or campus-scale monitoring and observability, specifically regarding alert hygiene and signal quality.
- Possess cross-domain systems engineering depth spanning at least two areas among compute, network, storage, power, and cooling telemetry.
- Demonstrate proficiency in scripting languages like Python or Bash alongside working knowledge in a systems language such as C, C++, Java, Go, or Rust.
Nice to have
- Experience operating within power plants, nuclear power plants, or other high-consequence industrial control environments.
- Background in AI/ML infrastructure or large-scale supercomputing deployments.
- Hands-on definition and implementation of Service Level Objectives, Indicators, and error budgets.
- Familiarity with data center hardware, networking gear, GPUs, and facility telemetry signals.
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
Where is this job located?
This position is based at the company data center campus located across Memphis, Tennessee and Southaven, Mississippi.
What kind of operational background is required?
Candidates should have experience in power plants, nuclear power plants, data centers, or similar high-consequence facilities spanning power, compute, cooling, and related plant systems.
What programming languages are needed?
Proficiency in scripting languages like Python and Bash for automation and analysis is required, plus general experience in at least one systems language such as C, C++, Java, Go, or Rust.
What is the team culture and structure like?
The organization operates with a flat structure where all employees are expected to be hands-on, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence.