Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI is forming a small, high-impact hiring “strike force” that reports directly to him and pays up to $240,000 a year — plus equity and other perks. 

According to a recent job posting, xAI is assembling what it calls a “small, elite unit” of “talent engineers” with the sole mission of finding and recruiting the “absolute best people in the world” in AI and engineering. 

Unlike conventional recruiters, xAI expects its “talent engineers” to be builders first and networkers second. The listing specifies that a successful candidate should have a history of creating “cool products” from childhood, and must be a “nerdy engineer” at their core, even if friends see them as a “people person.” They should also be comfortable with “vibe coding,” or instructing AI to build apps and other products for them. 

Overall, the job seeks people who can spot exceptional talent early, often in unconventional places, and then persuade those individuals to join xAI. The job is based in Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. 

The formation of this “elite” group of talent engineers shows that xAI is prioritizing recruiting efforts by giving the unit direct access to Musk, xAI’s CEO. The group will work with both the engineering and recruiting teams to find talent. 

xAI is ramping up hiring as the startup grows rapidly and gains billions of dollars in funding. Earlier this month, it announced that it had raised $20 billion in a Series E funding round, surpassing the $15 billion targeted round size and placing its valuation above $230 billion. 

xAI’s talent engineering unit comes about as global competition for AI researchers and engineers intensifies. Major tech companies, such as Meta and Google, have spent billions “acqui-hiring” startups primarily to secure their teams. 

For example, Meta agreed to acquire AI startup Manus last month for more than $2 billion. Manus developed a general-purpose AI agent, or AI that can act autonomously, for market research, coding, data analysis and other tasks. The startup already had millions of users. 

“Manus’s exceptional talent will join Meta’s team to deliver general-purpose agents across our consumer and business products, including in Meta AI,” Meta wrote in an announcement post at the time.

Meta has also been attempting to lure AI staff from rival companies. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed in June that Meta tried to poach OpenAI employees with “giant” $100 million signing bonuses, a figure that Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth later refuted at a company all-hands meeting. 

Google, meanwhile, struck a $2.4 billion deal in July to hire key talent from AI coding startup Windsurf, as well as secure a license to Windsurf technology. Earlier, in 2024, Google paid $2.7 billion to hire Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, the founders of AI chatbot startup Character.AI.

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