Backend Engineer - API
- Salary
- £107,000 - £262,000
- Level
- Mid
Not stated in the posting: work type, visa.
Open. First seen 2 October 2026.
About the role
SpaceXSI's standard text
SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today, SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary and expanding consciousness to the stars.
SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe. Our teams are building the full Super Intelligence stack: from our Colossus supercomputers, to Grok models, to our suite of applications, including Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X. We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next.
ABOUT THE ROLE:
As an ideal candidate you have a good understanding of how highly scalable and reliable production infrastructure is built. Most of our backend infrastructure is written in Rust. So familiarity with a compiled language such as C++, Rust, or Go is highly beneficial.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Build the SpaceXSI API that serves our models to developers worldwide
- Own the end-to-end system responsible for high-throughput inference, handling billions of tokens per minute with low latency and high availability, including model serving infrastructure, request routing, SDK development, rate limiting, observability, and efficient scaling
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:
- Expert knowledge of either Rust or C++
- Experience in designing, implementing, and maintaining reliable and horizontally scalable distributed systems
- Knowledge of service observability and reliability best practices
- Experience in operating commonly used databases such as PostgreSQL, Clickhouse, and MongoDB
PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:
- Experience with LLM inference engines and serving frameworks (e.g., SGLang, TensorRT, vLLM)
- Experience designing or building with agent SDKs and agent orchestration frameworks
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and containerized applications
- Expert knowledge of gRPC (unary, response streaming, bi-directional streaming, REST mapping)
COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:
£107,000 - £262,000 GBP
Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at SpaceXSI, which also includes equity, comprehensive healthcare and dental coverage, cash plan, income protection, life insurance, and various other discounts and perks.
SpaceXSI's standard text
SpaceXSI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice.
What this role asks for
Standard for backend roles
Kubernetes · PostgreSQL
Common in backend postings at any company.
61% of this description is written for the role. The rest is SpaceXSI's standard text, folded away below.
Read against SpaceXSI's other open postings on this site.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 27 open in Engineering. 3 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in April: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Python (13 of 27), Rust (10 of 27), C++ (8 of 27), Networking (7 of 27), Golang (6 of 27), Java (6 of 27), C (5 of 27)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Spring 2027 Software Engineering Internship/Co-op posted Oct 2
- Summer 2027 Software Engineering Internship/Co-op posted Oct 2
- Member of Technical Staff - Evaluation Infrastructure posted Sep 30
- Network Engineer posted Sep 14
- Network Engineer posted Sep 14
- Analytics Engineer - X posted Aug 12
- Research Analyst posted Aug 11
- Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure posted Aug 6
- Software Engineer - X Developer Platform posted Aug 5
- Software Engineer - Linux Kernel (C++, C) posted Aug 3
- Software Engineer - Evals posted Jul 22
- ML Infrastructure Engineer posted Jul 22
- Software Engineer - Platform Infrastructure (Rust, C++) posted Jul 20
- Software Engineer - Network Software and Services posted Jul 15
- Software Engineer - X Data Engineering posted Jul 12
- Software Engineer - Network (C++) posted Jul 2
- Network Operations Technician (SpaceXAI / Starlink) posted Jun 19
- Software Engineer, Ads Product posted Jun 2
- Member of Technical Staff - Imagine Safety posted May 31
- Software Engineer - Search Ranking posted Apr 30
- Software Engineer - Consumer Subscriptions posted Apr 16
- Software Engineer - X Money posted Apr 14
- Machine Learning Engineer - Ads posted Dec 3
- Exceptional Software Engineer posted Oct 23
- Software Engineer - Networking Software and Services posted Oct 15
- Machine Learning Engineer - Recommendation Systems posted Apr 11
From the team and dates on SpaceXSI's own job board.
See Backend Engineer salaries in London →
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