Senior Software Engineer

Company: Elicit
Location: Oakland
Posted on: June 1, 2025

Job Description:

Join our small team to build an AI tool for science, already used by hundreds of thousands of researchers.Our mission is to scale up good reasoning for scientists and beyond. Elicit helps expert researchers push the frontier of what's possible in fields like biomedicine, health economics, and computer science.Our customers pay us to deliver truthful answers from language models in high-stakes situations like biomedical research. This means AI alignment is part of how we will be successful as a company.We're small, talent-dense team. We ship a user-facing feature every week. Everyone takes ownership and we avoid letting egos or status games into the mix.We have an office in Oakland, CA, and team members spread across North America and Europe. We're light on meetings and don't micromanage your work.Elicit predates the AI bubble-we've been working on this since 2018. If you believe working with language models is a valuable career path, Elicit will be the best place to learn on the job.As individuals we have diverse interests and are involved in communities like 80,000 Hours, tools for thought, and web novels. At our last team dinner we discussed outdoor sports, phobias, and how AI can help elderly people.We reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue four months after activating subscriptions. We're financed by $9 million in venture capital.Elicit began in a research lab, with grand ambitions and a long time horizon. We're a Public Benefit Company, ensuring long-term good for the world even as we turn a profit.Why you might not love working here

• While we've raised a $9 million seed round and are growing in revenue every month, we're still a very early stage startup exploring our product market fit. That means projects and priorities will shift frequently. If you're a person who loves a lot of clearly defined structure and certainty, this might not be the right time for you to join Elicit (yet).
• We're a small team who loves to learn but if you need close mentorship, you might not find it here. We will support your growth, but at our stage, we need people who are excited to lead and direct their own learning, and who feel great about making impactful decisions daily.
• If having lots of direct reports is meaningful to you, you might not feel fulfilled at Elicit right away. We're growing our team (sometimes painfully) slowly, which means we don't expect new management layers to form any time soon. We embrace leadership and opportunities to teach your teammates what you know, but if your career goals include directly managing other humans, you should know your role might not move in that direction at Elicit.
• We are looking for people who excel in their wheelhouse, but who will also engage with and offer their perspective across different parts of the company. If you prefer to focus on your own lane, we're probably not quite ready for you yet. We are building Elicit together, as a team, and need people who are comfortable dissenting and raising flags when we could do something better. Above all, we care about having a positive impact on the world. As a company, we:
  • Work to steer AI towards positive impact by scaling up good reasoning.
  • Chose to be a Public Benefit Corporation to declare to the world that we choose impact over short-term profit.
  • Focus on building a product that actually improves people's reasoning and research quality. We aim to hold higher standards for accuracy than our users do or ask for. As individuals, we:
    • Each care deeply about our own personal impact on the world. We all strive to leave the world better than it was, in our own personal way.
    • Fully trust one another with large parts of the business and our work. When you know everybody else is accountable for their positive impact and ethical standards, it feels good to share the responsibility. We want to have a deeply transformative impact, big bold steps forward at a time. As a company, we:
      • Don't shy away from large, dramatic changes to the product.
      • Focus on building a product that actually improves people's reasoning and research quality. We aim to hold higher standards for accuracy than our users do or ask for. As individuals, we:
        • Build a habit of taking action. We operate with high agency, with a default of always moving forward.
        • Set goals for ourselves that sometimes scare us! (And help each other reach them.) We care about understanding the truth and becoming less wrong ourselves. As a company, we:
          • Don't chase hype. We care more about deep fundamental value and truths that will persist.
          • Focus on evaluating different features of Elicit, working with users to get high-quality examples of correct answers.
          • Respect the limitations of current language models, and don't have them automate large chunks of work. We prioritize making it very easy to check Elicit's work by showing steps and quotes from the process it took to arrive at an answer. As individuals, we:
            • Love to "yes, and" each other to get to the best possible version of every idea.
            • Write a lot! We like direct, straightforward writing and communication, with clear logical structure so people can follow along with your thinking.Set goals for ourselves that sometimes scare us! (And help each other reach them.) We're trying to build an outlier company with outlier results. This requires outlier levels of excellence. As a company, we:
              • Care more about hiring the right people than filling roles so we can execute more quickly.
              • Are particular about how we choose to express our excellence. At our current stage, we express our excellence with how effectively we can ship bold, product-changing features for our users. As individuals, we:
                • Celebrate craftsmanship as a distinctly Elician trait. Individually, we all love what we do beyond the company's mission and individual role. We're human people trying to do a superhuman thing. As a company, we:
                  • Remember that we're building for humans. We try hard to respond to every single user from the perspective that they're also a real human trying to get an important thing done, even if they're frustrated with us.
                  • Don't blindly optimize for metrics. We try to understand what really matters to people. As individuals, we:
                    • Embrace "unserious seriousness." We take our work and impact seriously, while still having a grounded sense of humor about it.
                    • Support each others' success by seeking and sharing thoughtful feedback. Maintaining a high bar for excellence works better when we're building each other up toward it.
                    • Take naps when we need to take naps! As humans, we know that rest is a requirement.Who you'll work with Our team has backgrounds and interests spanning research, academia, startups, engineering, and tools for thought. When we aren't saving the world from AI catastrophe and the slow demise of the modern concept of truth, we are making music, gardening, baking elaborately layered desserts that take multiple days to complete, "vlogging" (sort of), and spending time with our cats. We're backed by an outstanding group of investors, including deep tech seed fund Fifty Years, with participation from Basis Set, Illusian, Mythos, Julian Capital, and angel investors with expertise in AI & AI alignment, startups, and research, including Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of Github, Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox, Thomas Ebeling, former CEO of Novartis, and Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google. Automate time-consuming research tasks like summarizing papers, extracting data, and synthesizing your findings.
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Keywords: Elicit, Turlock , Senior Software Engineer, IT / Software / Systems , Oakland, California