xAI Software Engineer interview experience

The topic was a Python language model application, and it wasn’t enough to jump straight into code—I had to first explain, at a high level, how the language model worked and how that understanding mapped to the specific application context.

Then the live portion centered on filling in a function based on what the application needed. It felt like they wanted correctness and clarity in how I reasoned from the model’s behavior to the software logic, not just familiarity with the surface API. The work itself was challenging, and I didn’t end up getting an offer from that path.