Machine Learning Engineer

About Elicit

Elicit is building the reasoning layer for science and decision-making. We use language models to search over 125 million papers, extract data, and surface insights so that researchers, policy-makers, and industry leaders can go from questions to evidence-backed decisions in minutes.

Today, hundreds of thousands of researchers have used Elicit to speed up literature reviews, automate systematic reviews, and explore new domains. As we expand our impact beyond academic research, we are laying the groundwork for ML systems that are systematic, transparent, and unbounded when reasoning at scale.

To do this, Elicit is pioneering supervision of process, not outcomes. Instead of favoring large black-box models, we break complex questions down into human-legible steps and supervise the reasoning process itself. This approach delivers more transparent, defensible answers today and charts a safer path toward advanced AI tomorrow.

Our vision is ambitious : we're building the default starting point for understanding and reasoning through any hard question. We invite you to help us build that future.

(See how people use Elicit today on Twitter; explore our vision in the roadmap.)

About the role

As an ML research engineer at Elicit, you will :

• Compose together tens to thousands of calls to language models to accomplish tasks that we can't accomplish with a single call.
• Curate datasets for finetuning models, e.g. for training models to extract policy conclusions from papers
• Set up evaluation metrics that tell us what changes to our models or training setup are improvements
• Scale up semantic search from a few thousand documents to 100k+ documents

About you

To help us get there :

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.)

You can review a longer list of the kinds of ML-related projects you'd be working on here.

Location and travel

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, so we ask that all Elicians spend 1 week out of every 6 with teammates.

Am I a good fit?

Consider these questions :

Strong applicants will find it easy to answer these questions.

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) :

Compensation

For all roles at Elicit, we use a data-backed compensation framework to make sure our salaries are market-competitive, equitable, and simple. For this role, we're targeting starting ranges of :

We're optimizing for a hire who can contribute at a L4 / senior-level or above. We'd love to meet staff / principal level contributors as well.

We also offer above-market equity for all roles at Elicit, as well as employee-friendly equity terms (10-year exercise periods).

Join us!