AI Engineer

ABOUT the company

The company 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, the company pushes the frontier forward.

• For non-experts, the company 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 the company.

• The company is a scalable ML system based on human-understandable task decompositions, with supervision of process, not outcomes [link for members] This expands our collective understanding of safe AGI architectures.

Visit our Twitter [link for members] learn more about how the company 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 [link for members] 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 the company last fall, response has been strong. We introduced the company 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 the company work. This is what an AI engineer will be responsible for at the company.

[[link for members]

OUR TECH STACK

• Backend: Node and Python.

• Frontend: Next.js and TypeScript (we expect you to be 80+% focussed on backend work, however).

• We like static type checking in Python and TypeScript

• All infrastructure runs in Kubernetes across a couple of clouds

• We use GitHub for code reviews and CI

AM I A GOOD FIT?

Consider the questions

• What's the difference between anyio, trio, and asyncio?

• What does the await keyword do in JavaScript?

• What is a Kubernetes pod, and how is it different from a container?

• How would you manage state when using an LLM to power a conversation?

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

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

• Backend implementation of our "living document"

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

• We wrote about our living document [link for members] approach which is one way in which users can have much richer LLM-powered product experiences.

• You would work on, curate, extend, and improve the backend part of that technology. This is fascinating and challenging distributed systems work.

• Building the company into a product researchers can’t live without

• 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 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.

• Keeping the company’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 system design, performance evaluation, and architecture.

PROJECTS YOU'LL CONTRIBUTE TO

You can view sample projects here. [link for members]

WHAT YOU BRING TO THE ROLE

• Strong technical aptitude that allows you to move comfortably around our back-end tech stack, with strong computer science fundamentals.

• A genuine curiosity and enthusiasm for the capabilities of language models.

• A defensive, fault-first mindset.

• Above-average communication skills. The company is a small, highly-collaborative team, so you’ll frequently be tapped to communicate complex engineering topics with stakeholders across the company.

• A sense of joy in what you do. One thing we love about our team at the company is that everybody’s a craftsperson who cares deeply about their field.

YOUR FIRST WEEK

• Start building foundational context

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

• You’ll get to know our company documentation and other supporting resources like Supporting Process, not Outcomes [link for members]

• Make your first contribution to the company

• 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

• You’ll complete your first multi-issue project

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

• You’re actively improving the team

• 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.

• You’ve added some documentation, how-to guides, diagrams, or other resources meant to help us and new hires in the future.

• You’ve suggested an improvement to our development process.

YOUR FIRST QUARTER

• You’re flying solo

• 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.

• You’ve developed an area of expertise

• 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 the company you’ll become the domain expert for that others reach out to for support when working in this area.

• You actively research and improve the product

• By the end of your first quarter, you’ll have gotten to know the company 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.

LOCATION AND TRAVEL

We have a great office in Oakland, CA, and we'd love to see you there if you're local. That said, we're just as happy for you to work remotely. We do get the whole team together for a quarterly retreat somewhere fun, because in-person time matters to us.

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):

• Flexible work environment: work from our office in Oakland or remotely with time zone overlap (between GMT and GMT-8), as long as you can travel for in-person retreats and coworking events

• Fully covered health, dental, vision, and life insurance for you, generous coverage for the rest of your family

• Flexible vacation policy, with a recommendation of 20 days/year + company holidays

• Every Elician receives a $200 monthly wellbeing stipend to spend on whatever supports your health and wellbeing.

• 401K with a 6% employer match

• A new Mac + $1,000 budget to set up your workstation or home office in your first year, then $500 every year thereafter

• $1,000 quarterly AI Experimentation & Learning budget, so you can freely experiment with new AI tools to incorporate into your workflow, take courses, purchase educational resources, or attend AI-focused conferences and events

• A team administrative assistant who can help you with personal and work tasks

• You can find more reasons to work with us in this thread [link for members]

COMPENSATION

For all roles at the company, we use a data-backed compensation framework to keep salaries market-competitive, equitable, and simple to understand. For this role, we target starting ranges of:

• Senior (L4): $195-260k + equity

• Expert (L5): $250-300k + equity

• Principal (L6): >$270 + significant equity

We're optimizing for a hire who can contribute at a L4/senior-level or above.

We offer above-market equity for all roles at the company, as well as employee-friendly equity terms.