xAI is hiring an 'elite unit' that reports directly to Elon Musk to recruit top engineers

• Elon Musk's xAI says it's hiring an "elite" team to give it an edge in the AI talent wars.
• The team of "talent engineers" will focus on hiring the "absolute best people in the world."
• Successful applicants need to be comfortable with vibe coding and should be "nerdy engineers" at heart.

Elon Musk is building a recruitment strike force at xAI.

The AI startup is hiring a team of "talent engineers" to supercharge its hiring of top engineers as the AI boom fuels a red-hot race for talent.

The "small, elite unit" will report directly to Musk and focus on creating "novel approaches" to identify and hire the "absolute best people in the world," according to a job listing posted on xAI's website.

Successful applicants need to be comfortable with vibe coding, have a history of building cool products, "even as a kid," and must be a "nerdy engineer" at heart — even though their friends see them as a "people person."

The role, which pays $120,000-240,000 and is based in Palo Alto, California, is the latest novel approach taken by AI startups and Big Tech giants to snap up in-demand AI talent.

Meta and Google have spent billions on promising AI startups to "acqui-hire" their top engineers and executives, while Sam Altman said in June that Meta offered OpenAI employees a $100 million signing bonus — a figure which a Meta executive later said OpenAI had countered.

Musk isn't the only top CEO to get personally involved in hiring top talent. OpenAI's chief research officer, Mark Chen, said in December that Mark Zuckerberg attempted to lure some OpenAI engineers to Meta by hand-delivering them soup.

xAI's focus on hiring comes as the startup continues to grow despite being embroiled in controversy over its Grok chatbot.

The AI startup raised $20 billion earlier this month at a valuation of over $230 billion, as it battles backlash around the world over Grok generating sexualized images of real people on X.

The social media platform said last week it would prevent Grok from sexualizing images of real people after California's Attorney General said the state would launch an investigation into reports that Grok had produced deepfakes of women and minors on X.

The AI chatbot has also faced temporary bans in Indonesia and Malaysia, and an investigation from the UK's media regulator. xAI did not respond to a request for comment.