Job Details

Oakland, CA (or remote within US timezones)

Employment Type

Full time

About Elicit

Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help researchers verify facts and make better decisions, focusing on tasks like literature review.

Our goals:

• Radically increase good reasoning worldwide
• Advance the frontier for experts
• Make good reasoning accessible for non-experts

Elicit is a scalable ML system based on human-understandable task decompositions, with supervision of process, not outcomes, contributing to safe AGI architectures.

Check our Twitter for current impacts and our roadmap for future vision.

About the role

As an ML research engineer, you will:

• Compose sequences of language model calls to accomplish complex tasks
• Curate datasets for model fine-tuning, e.g., extracting policy conclusions from papers
• Establish evaluation metrics to measure improvements
• Scale semantic search from thousands to over 100,000 documents

About you

You should have:

• A strong software engineering background, capable of building systems and designing architecture beyond scripting
• Familiarity with language models (training, fine-tuning, evaluation) or related ML/NLP experience
• A startup mindset, eager to test ideas, learn, and grow

We value direct evaluation of work, as seen in this thread.

Our office is in Oakland, CA, but remote work is possible. We expect in-person collaboration about 1 week every 6 weeks, plus quarterly retreats and co-working weeks. Flexibility is available—please reach out if needed.

Are you a good fit?

Can you answer questions like:

• How does a transformer work?
• What is a tokenizer?
• What is a decorator in Python?
• What are generic types?

Strong candidates will find these questions straightforward.

Benefits

• Flexible work environment (remote or Oakland office)
• Comprehensive health, dental, vision, and life insurance
• Flexible vacation (minimum 20 days/year + holidays)
• 401K with 6% match
• Workstation setup budget ($1,000 in first year, then $500 annually)
• Quarterly AI experimentation and learning budget
• Administrative support, benefits, and more

Compensation

Targeting senior (L4) roles with starting ranges of $210K-$300K plus equity. We value contributions at or above L4 and offer above-market equity terms.

Additional responsibilities include automating research tasks such as summarizing papers, extracting data, and synthesizing findings.