Sr. Software Engineer - Elicit

About Elicit

Elicit is the AI research assistant. We use 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Our Twitter page shows how Elicit helps researchers today. Our roadmap outlines our vision for how Elicit impacts more than research in the future.

About the role

You're responsible for:

• Shipping exciting functionality to our users!
• Appreciating the user needs underlying a proposed piece of work.
• Contributing to discussions around UX / system design / architecture.
• Balancing shipping features in the short term with building extensible and maintainable systems.
• Quickly prototyping new ideas.
• Taking on ownership of maintaining and building out systems to keep development flowing.
• Stepping into work and decisions that might be out of your comfort zone.

About the work

• You’ll use Node and Python in our backend codebases, probably shifting to more Node over time. Our frontend uses React, TypeScript, and Tailwind.
• We like static type checking in Python and TypeScript.
• Because of the way language models work, you’ll write a lot of asynchronous code and need to think defensively about error handling.
• You'll be part of a small, fast-paced team: crossing boundaries to other parts of the work will often be the best way to get things done.
• You will be working on a mix of known features / fixes, prototypes to validate ideas, and semi-nebulous projects in between.

About you

We're looking for a team member who can contribute at a mid-career to senior level (L3-L4). While we're open to hearing from folks with untraditional or unexpected backgrounds, we expect that the typical person who fits that profile will likely have 3-5 years of startup experience. An ideal teammate for this role...

• Will thrive in an environment with quick iterations and a tight feedback loop.
• Is motivated by shipping valuable tools to users.
• Wants for their work to have a positive social impact.
• Is excited to teach and learn from others.
• Is comfortable owning decisions.

To get a sense for how some of us look at applications, see this thread. (The short version: Wherever we can we prefer to directly evaluate work.)

Benefits

In addition to working on important problems as part of a happy, productive, and positive team, we also offer great benefits (with some variation based on work location):

• Flexible work environment - work from our office in Oakland or remotely
• 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
• 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 that you can delegate personal and work tasks to
• Different speakers, tutors, and coaches to facilitate professional development
• Commuter benefits
• A relocation bonus, if you decide to relocate to Oakland!

For all roles at Elicit, we use a data-backed compensation framework to make sure our salaries are market-competitive, equitable, and simple to understand. For this role, we're targeting a range of $170,000-$200,000, depending on your level and competencies that impact the scope of your role.

You can find more reasons to work with us in this thread.

Join us!