AI Engineer
Elicit · Oakland, CA (or remote within US timezones)
About this role
**AI Engineer — Elicit** ## About Elicit Elicit is an AI research assistant that helps researchers determine what’s true and make better decisions—starting with common research tasks like literature review. **What we’re aiming for:** - **Radically increase good reasoning** in the world - For experts: push the frontier forward - For non-experts: make good reasoning more affordable - **Build a scalable ML system** based on human-understandable task decompositions, with supervision of process (not just outcomes) ## What is an “AI Engineer”? AI engineering is a new category of technical work enabled by powerful AI tools—especially generative ML systems like large language models. If you’re a software engineer who enjoys the harder backend problems (concurrency, fault-tolerance, distributed systems), you could be a great fit. ## Why we’re hiring Elicit has strong momentum after launching a new version and introducing **Elicit Plus**. The team wants to ship useful AI-powered functionality faster—especially around **how we prompt, invoke, respond to, and manage multiple ML models**. ## Tech stack - **Backend:** Node and Python - **Frontend:** Next.js and TypeScript (expected ~80% backend focus) - Static type checking in Python and TypeScript - **Infrastructure:** Kubernetes across a couple of clouds - **Workflow:** GitHub for code reviews and CI ## Are you a good fit? If you can answer these without relying on documentation, we’d love to chat: - Difference between **anyio**, **trio**, and **asyncio** - What the **`await`** keyword does in JavaScript - What a **Kubernetes pod** is, and how it differs from a container - How you’d manage **state** when using an LLM to power a conversation ## What you’ll own - Backend implementation of our **“living document”** experience - Build Elicit into a product researchers can’t live without - Work between **BFF endpoints and the ML models** Elicit uses - Mix of known features/fixes, prototypes, and exploratory projects - Maintain a high quality bar while balancing shipping and long-term maintainability - Own features in production: **scalable, resilient, and easy to operate** - Contribute to system design, performance evaluation, and architecture discussions ## Projects you’ll contribute to You can view sample projects here: https://airtable.com/app9at9MxvT5VQbss/shrPavNcNjMClBMB2 ## What you bring - Strong technical aptitude + solid CS fundamentals - Genuine curiosity about language model capabilities - Defensive, fault-first mindset - Above-average communication skills (you’ll explain complex engineering topics to stakeholders) - Joy in your craft ## Your first week / month / quarter (high level) - **Week 1:** build context, learn the stack/product roadmap, make your first contribution (e.g., Linear issue + PR), understand CI/CD and monitoring/logging - **Month 1:** complete a multi-issue project, contribute to team processes, demo work, add helpful documentation - **Quarter 1:** implement independently, become a go-to resource in an area, scope user-facing and technical improvements ## Location & travel - Office in **Oakland, CA** (in-person preferred if local) - **Remote is welcome** - Quarterly in-person retreat (somewhere fun) ## Benefits & perks - Flexible work (Oakland or remote with time zone overlap between **GMT and GMT-8**) - Fully covered health/dental/vision/life insurance (and generous coverage for family) - Flexible vacation (minimum recommendation **20 days/year** + compan
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