Software Engineer - Observability
Build and maintain scalable observability platform handling massive telemetry for metrics, logs, tracing, and alerting. Requires production proficiency in Go/Rust/Scala, distributed systems expertise, and experience with tools like Prometheus, Kubernetes, Kafka.
About the job
About the Team
The Observability team builds and operates the core infrastructure that enables engineers to monitor, debug, and optimize the performance and reliability of their systems. We handle telemetry at massive scale — billions of time series and petabytes of logs — with strict performance and availability requirements.
About the Role
You will be part of the small, high-impact team responsible for building and maintaining X’s observability platform. You’ll own critical systems that power metrics, logs, tracing, and alerting enabling engineering teams to operate services at scale, identify issues before they impact users, and drive systemic reliability improvements.
What You’ll Do
- Design and implement scalable observability infrastructure for metrics, logging, and tracing.
- Build high-performance telemetry pipelines that handle massive ingestion volumes.
- Develop APIs, query engines, and UIs that allow engineers to get real-time insights into their services.
- Define and enforce best practices for instrumentation, alerting, and reliability across the company.
- Partner with infrastructure and product teams to deeply integrate observability into our internal platforms.
- Own the reliability, scalability, and performance of the observability stack end-to-end.
Ideal Candidate
- Production-level proficiency in Go, Rust, Scala, or a similar languages
- Deep understanding of distributed systems and telemetry architecture.
- Experience building and operating infrastructure at scale.
- Familiarity with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, VictoriaMetrics, or ClickHouse.
- Experience with Kafka, Redis, or large-scale time series databases.
- Experience operating observability pipelines in Kubernetes or similar orchestration environments.
Annual Salary Range
$180,000 - $440,000 USD
Benefits
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.
Skills
Go, Rust, Scala, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Victoriametrics, ClickHouse, Kafka, Redis
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