xAI
Software Engineer, Ads Product
Palo Alto, CA · Intern · Internship
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
The bottom of this range ($150,000) is below the Level I prevailing wage of $152,797. An H-1B cannot be filed below the prevailing wage, so an offer at the floor of this band could not be sponsored as posted.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $187,075 would place this position at wage Level II. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
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About the role
- X Ads is one of the highest-leverage product areas at X.
- You'll work on systems that operate at massive scale, directly affect the business, and are being rebuilt with modern infrastructure and AI at the center.
- This is an opportunity to join a small, fast-moving team where early-career engineers can take on real ownership, learn from strong engineers, and ship products that matter.
Responsibilities
- Build and ship product features across the X Ads Platform.
- Collaborate closely with engineers, product leads, and cross-functional partners to turn ideas into working products.
- Debug, maintain, and improve production systems that serve real users and drive significant business impact.
Requirements
- Ability to write clean, maintainable code and learn new codebases quickly.
Skills
- Experience with ads, recommendations, search, ranking, marketplaces, payments, analytics, or growth systems.
- Experience working with large-scale backend systems or data processing pipelines.
- Experience with React, Golang, Python, Rust, gRPC, Java, or Scala.
- Experience with machine learning, LLMs, experimentation, ranking, or optimization systems.
- Prior startup, research, internship, or high-impact project experience.
- Java / Scala
- This organization is for individuals who appreciate challenging themselves and thrive on curiosity.
- All employees are expected to be hands-on and to contribute directly to the company's mission.
- Work ethic and strong prioritization skills are important.
- All employees are expected to have strong communication skills.
- They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.
- React
Compensation
- $150,000 - $350,000 USD
Company info
- We're looking for high-slope software engineers who want to help rebuild and transform the X Ads Platform using xAI's infrastructure and AI stack.
Equal opportunity
- xAI is an equal opportunity employer.
This listing is sourced directly from xAI's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.