I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day.

I was shortlisted by the xAI Recruiting Team based on my GitHub profile and my open-source work and was subsequently approached on LinkedIn regarding this opportunity. The team then coordinated with me to schedule an interview.

The interview started with a brief self-introduction, followed by several questions based on my open-source contributions and GitHub projects.

The interviewer then discussed system design scenarios, asking:

• How I would scale a backend system to handle 10,000+ users
• What potential failure points could arise from features I had implemented
• What alternative approaches I had considered while designing backend solutions

The discussion then moved to frontend development, particularly React. I was asked about:

• React Hooks
• When to use specific hooks
• Practical use cases for hooks such as useState, useEffect, and useMemo

Additional topics included event-driven architecture and JWT-based authentication.

Finally, I was given a JavaScript coding problem related to the event loop, focusing on microtasks and macrotasks. I was asked to determine the order in which different statements would be executed and printed. This was the only question that I was unable to solve completely during the interview. Ended up not getting selected!