About Elicit
Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help researchers figure out what’s true and make better decisions, starting with common research tasks like literature review.
What we're aiming for:
Elicit radically increases the amount of good reasoning in the world.
For experts, Elicit pushes the frontier forward.
For non-experts, Elicit makes good reasoning more affordable. People who don't have the tools, expertise, time, or mental energy to make well-reasoned decisions on their own can do so with Elicit.
Elicit is a scalable ML system based on human-understandable task decompositions, with supervision of process, not outcomes. This expands our collective understanding of safe AGI architectures.
Visit our Twitter to learn more about how Elicit is helping researchers and making progress on our mission.
Why we’re hiring for this role
Since launching the newest version of Elicit last fall, response has been strong. We introduced Elicit Plus, our monthly subscription plan, and added thousands of paying users in a matter of months as well as hundreds of thousands of new sign-ups. This has been energizing for our team, but we want to ship more useful functionality to our users even faster. We want to add another strong senior-level engineer to our team who’ll help us meet the demand for new features and improved performance.
Our tech stack
Backend: Node and Python (probably shifting more to Node over time)
Frontend: Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind
We like static type checking in Python and TypeScript
All infrastructure runs in Kubernetes across a couple of clouds
We use GitHub for code reviews and CI
Am I a good fit?
Consider these questions:
What are a couple of different ways to write concurrent code in Python?
What are the differences between var, let, and const in JavaScript?
What are a couple of different web technologies to asynchronously send data from a server to a client?
In which situations would you use REST vs. GraphQL vs. RPC?
Strong applicants will find it easy to answer these questions.
Location and travel
We have a lovely office in Oakland, CA, but we don't all work from there all the time. It's important to us to spend time with our teammates, however, so we ask that all Elicians spend 1 week out of every 6 with teammates.
We have a quarterly team retreat, normally in and around the SF bay area.
We have quarterly co-working weeks (offset from the team retreats) in our Oakland office.
If you come to the retreats and co-working weeks, you'll meet our expectations for in-person time!
There is flexibility around the specifics here: if you're not sure you can make this work, get in touch.
What you'll do
You'll own:
Projects you'll contribute to:
You can view sample projects here.
Your first week:
Your first month:
Your first quarter:
What you bring to the role
Strong technical aptitude that allows you to move comfortably around our tech stack, both back-end and front-end, with strong computer science fundamentals.
Professional experience contributing to software development teams at a mid-career to senior level. We’re excited for you to unpack your past successes and build off your previous experience at Elicit!
Above-average communication skills. Elicit is a small, highly-collaborative team, so you’ll frequently be tapped to communicate complex engineering topics with stakeholders across the company.
Your past experience or exposure to working with language models. Because of the way language models work, you’re used to writing a lot of asynchronous code and thinking defensively about error handling.
A sense of joy in what you do. One thing we love about our team at Elicit is that everybody’s a craftsperson who cares deeply about their field.
Who you’ll work with
This role will report directly to James, our Head of Engineering, and work very closely with the rest of the engineering team:
You'll also spend a lot of time collaborating with Product Designers, Kevin (Head of Product), and co-founders Jungwon & Andreas.
Compensation, benefits, and perks
In addition to working on important problems as part of a productive and positive team, we also offer great benefits (with some variation based on location):
Flexible work environment: work from our office in Oakland or remotely with time zone overlap (between GMT and GMT-8), as long as you’re comfortable traveling for in-person retreats and coworking events
Fully covered health, dental, vision, and life insurance for you, generous coverage for the rest of your family (FSA/HSA, too)
Flexible vacation policy, with a minimum recommendation of 20 days / year and plenty of company holidays
401K with a 6% employer match
$2,000 device budget to start, with more accumulating for each month of work
$500 / year personal development budget
A team administrative assistant who can help you with personal and work tasks
You can find more reasons to work with us in this thread!
For all roles at Elicit, we use a data-backed compensation framework to keep salaries market-competitive, equitable, and simple to understand.
