AI Engineer

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.

Visit our Twitter to learn more about how Elicit is helping researchers and making progress on our mission.

What is an "AI Engineer"?

AI engineering is a new category of technical work. Its emergence is linked to the increasing availability of powerful new artificial intelligence tools : notably generative machine learning systems like large language models.

The term was suggested by swyx on the Latent Space podcast and we've written about it on our blog before.

Elicit predicted the rise of powerful ML systems even before GPT-1 was trained, and has the deepest experience of building trustworthy, capable, and transparent applications using these tools.

If you're a software engineer who relishes the more difficult parts of backend code-like concurrency, fault-tolerance, and distributed systems-you could be a great AI engineer.

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 believe that building great AI-powered products requires excellence across multiple parts of the tech stack : from frontend UX to infrastructure. But one of the crux areas is certainly how we prompt, invoke, respond to, and manage the suite of different ML models required to make Elicit work. This is what an AI engineer will be responsible for at Elicit.

Our tech stack

Am I a good fit?

Consider the questions :

If you have a solid answer for these-without reference to documentation-then we should chat!

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.

What you'll do

You'll own

We believe that user interactions with language models should be much deeper than yet more chatbot interfaces.

We ship useful, exciting features out to users on a weekly basis. Your focus will be on the code which exists between the BFF endpoints and the ML models we use.

You'll balance shipping features in the short term with building extensible and maintainable systems.

Projects you'll contribute to

You can view sample projects here.

Your first week

Get to know your team, our stack, and the product roadmap.

By the end of your first week, you'll have completed your first Linear issue, have a PR merged into our monorepo, gained understanding of our CI / CD pipeline, and learned about our monitoring and logging tools.

Your first month

As you learn the ropes, you're able to tackle more impactful projects, with input from domain experts where you need it.

You'll have gotten into the swing of contributing to regular team meetings and hack days, and you've demoed something you've worked on during a team sync.

Your first quarter

With the context you've gained, you're able to implement changes independently and you're comfortable making big, impactful decisions in the course of your work.

Our engineering team is just a few people, so each person quickly becomes a go-to resource in some area of the tech. Within your first quarter, we expect that there's a part of Elicit you'll become the domain expert for that others reach out to for support when working in this area.

By the end of your first quarter, you'll have gotten to know Elicit and our users well. We expect that you'll have thought about and scoped some user-facing improvements to the product as well as identified technical improvements to implement.

What you bring to the role

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 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) :

For all roles at Elicit, we use a data-backed compensation framework to keep salaries market-competitive, equitable, and simple to understand.

Salary : $195,000 - $230,000