Sr. Model Engineer, Mid-training
Palo Alto, CAJob$180–440K/yrPosted todayStill listed today
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At a glance
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Job overview
SpaceXSI is building a Super Intelligence stack spanning supercomputers, Grok models, and applications. The Sr. Model Engineer, Mid-training will scale synthetic coding data, distill flagship-model intelligence into flash models, optimize mid-training data mixtures, engineer long-context data recipes, and develop evaluations for mid-training checkpoints.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Benefits
Full job description
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.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Scale synthetic coding data to trillions of tokens with large-scale docker verification
- Distill the intelligence of flagship models into flash models through synthetic data generation
- Optimize mid-training data mixtures to boost the ceiling for RL
- Engineer long-context data recipes
- Develop robust and diverse evaluation for mid-training checkpoints
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience writing production-quality code in Python, PyTorch, JAX, Rust, or C++
- Experience training large models (e.g., pre-training, post-training, fine-tuning, or RL training of neural networks with 1B+ parameters)
PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:
- Familiarity across all kinds of scaling laws
- Strong ability to design ML experiments
- Familiarity with state-of-the-art techniques for curating AI training data for text, image, audio, and video modalities
- Strong engineering abilities in large-scale data processing frameworks
- Experience with ML and large model scaling
- Experience with Spark, Ray, and other large-scale data processing frameworks
COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS: $180,000 - $440,000 USD Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at SpaceXSI, 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. SpaceXSI is an equal opportunity employer. For details on data processing, view our Recruitment Privacy Notice.
How this job compares
Set against the 6,099 open Machine Learning Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 3, 2026.
- Pay
- This posting$180–440K/yr
- California median$176–261K/yr1,350 salary ranges
- US median$148–245K/yr4,859 salary ranges
This range's midpoint, $310K, is 40% above the California median midpoint ($222K) — in the top quarter of Machine Learning Engineer salary ranges in California.
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 1,824 open Machine Learning Engineer jobs in California and 6,099 across the US. 8% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Experience
- Machine Learning Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years of experience at the median; the middle half ask for 3 to 7 years (4,881 postings).
- Education
- 2,296 of the 6,099 open Machine Learning Engineer jobs (38%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 3, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.
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