Baris Akis

After finishing my CS degree from Stanford, I became obsessed with excelling in recruiting because I believe humans are the atomic unit of value creation—and assembling the most exceptional people is the highest-leverage way to compound value. Now, I'm assembling a team of unconventional engineers at xAI to scale the world's highest talent-density organization. If interested DM me or apply here

@bykahlil @naturalpay You and Walt are incredible. It’s our privilege to be your partners.

Baris backed @naturalpay when it was just an idea, and has doubled down every chance he’s had since. He moves quickly, acts decisively, and leads with conviction. Class act

@EastlondonDev Unfortunately our interview process used to be more academic than applied. One of the reasons we lost the opportunity to work with some great builders who were interested. We made a good amount of changes to simulate the actual day to day work as much as possible.

I interviewed at xAI, 3 of my 4 interviews were leet coding no AI allowed. No check whatsoever of my ability to use AI as an engineer. Compare with Replit where I’ve just been contracting - they’re creating new kinds of interviews where candidates get access to Claude code and the internal AI sandbox.

@tetsuoai @elonmusk @xai 100% we are hiring more and more from people who share their useful projects on X

@elonmusk @xai @barisakis So much talent on this platform.

Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI. My apologies. @BarisAkis and I are going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates.

@andrewoetting @elonmusk @xai @MeritFirstUS Thank you, amazing. Merit first! 🤓

@elonmusk @xai @barisakis @barisakis check out @MeritFirstUS we built it to help w this

@elonmusk @milichab @JasonBud Thank you for inspiring all of us, and always leading on the front lines. 🚀

@barisakis @milichab @JasonBud Thanks for helping build xAI. If I could go back in time, you would be on the founding team.

Thrilled to welcome @milichab and @JasonBud to build what’s possible at XAI + SpaceX The AI products that truly transforms the world and delivers abundance for humanity won't look like today's tools. It demands first-principles rethinking, grand ambition, vastly more training compute—and crucially, 100X+ inference scale to serve billions in real time. What gets me out of bed every morning is the certainty that this future is within reach, but only possible within one ecosystem that innovates across energy, chips, data centers, AI models, space ships, internet, and humanoid robots.

I wake up grateful every morning to be living the American Dream 🇺🇸 The Dream based on a timeless promise rooted in the Pursuit of Happiness. Here, no matter your origins, you can forge your path to success and prosperity through hard work, and determination. America remains the ultimate haven for those who chase this dream via entrepreneurship: the builders, makers, and founders. Though they may not grace the headlines, the true heroes modeling the American Dream are our Main Street operators in every town across this land of the free. They fuel local economies, serve their communities, and represent the backbone of our economy - 40% of US GDP - 60 million Americans employed Yet today, we face a crisis: - The majority of our the SMBs are owned and operated by boomers approaching retirement without a clear path to pass the torch. - Our best on-the-ground operators lack the financial vehicles to become owners. Fueled by these threats, we partnered with Will Fry, @BuySellSMB, and Joe Lonsdale,@JTLonsdale, to build American Operator, @OperateUSA Based in Austin, TX, American Operator is rapidly scaling the team, hiring great engineers and operators. DM @OperateUSA to join the mission. Let’s Revive the American Dream 🇺🇸

What a blast 💥 Next one, coming soon!

One of our core beliefs at @humancapital is that the right group of people, sufficiently motivated and capitalized can solve any tractable problem. This ultimately means that the true moat is the quality of team, speed of execution and pain tolerance. @mansourtarek_ and @luanalopeslara are focused on building a world-class team. We believe they have consistently exhibited maniacal urgency and true grit. Founders like this endure because their mission is deeply rooted and personal. They never lose the underdog mentality.

You don't wanna drive after a short 36h work-day? No problem, join xAI in London and take the tube home. Check out the page below for more information about roles, perks, and the interview process. x.ai/london/

xAI Hackathon – the ultimate arena for the most hardcore product builders. 24 hours & exclusive access to upcoming Grok models & X APIs Apply by 11/22 🔗 x.ai/hackathon

@BrentM_SpaceX @xai @xAIMemphis Maniacal urgency in the human form!

Not an endorsement but do want to highlight that it takes the entire (@xai @xAIMemphis ) hardcore A$$ team to develop these technologies and deploy them as fast as possible. Credit not required, results are the metric and if those “results” are not at the forefront of the organization you will (and should) fail. Please go apply to join the @xai team with @barisakis being the key POC to come build with maniacal sense of urgency (across all fronts).

@TheGregYang @dpwesq @xai 🚀🚀🚀

one of the most profound things I learned building @xai: you win if you consistently hire the best people everything else (e.g. organization, strategy, etc) is 2nd order and only the best people know how to hire the best people you know when you are one of them join us

After knowing Walt, and Kahlil for more than 5-years we had no doubt on their level of ambition and their bar for the team they want to build. We are excited to lead their Seed round, and work closely with them to scale an exceptional team to build the payment stack for AI agents.

Prufrock-4 is our smartest, fastest and safest Tunnel Boring Machine. And the next iterations (5, 6, and 7) are already being built at The Boring Factory in Texas. Goal is Continuous Mining and Zero-People-in-Tunnel (ZPIT). We are hiring exceptional ME, EE, and SWEs - join us!

For the restless builders, the impatient entrepreneurs, the eager engineers.

“Ali served as Official Taste-Tester at his family's confectionery business in Bangladesh at age six.” Proud to be building @humandotcapital with my favorite cookie monster @1armaanali forbes.com/profile/human-…

@hdubugras Congrats! We are one of the early users and it's been an incredible experience. Thanks for building such a seamless product.

We launched Brex Cash. A bank account replacement w/ an industry-leading yield; the only one that rather than charge you, rewards you; integrated w/ Card for full visibility on how money flows thru your business. brex.com/cash