Senior Software Engineer

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.

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.

Build Elicit into a product researchers can’t live without

You’ll fully own shipping useful, exciting features out to users on a weekly basis.

You will work on a mix of known features / fixes, prototypes to validate ideas, and exploratory projects in between.

Our team is small, so we expect you to appreciate the user needs underlying everything you work on. You should be comfortable making decisions and trade-offs that help us fulfill users’ needs best.

Keep Elicit's bar for quality high

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

You will be responsible for your features in production: they need to be scalable, resilient, and easy to operate.

You’ll contribute to discussions around UX, system design, and architecture.

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.

Backend:
Node and Python

Frontend:
Next.js, Type Script, and Tailwind

We like static type checking in Python and Type Script

All infrastructure runs in Kubernetes across a couple of clouds

We use Git Hub for code reviews and CI

Consider these questions:

• What are a couple of different ways to write concurrent code in Python?
• 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. Graph
  
  QL vs. RPC?
• Strong applicants will find it easy to answer these questions.

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, we have a quarterly team retreat, normally in and around the SF bay area.

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…