Frontend Engineer

About Elicit

Elicit 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:

1. Elicit radically increases the amount of good reasoning in the world.

   • For experts, Elicit pushes the frontier forward.

   • For non-experts, Elicit 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 Elicit.

2. Elicit is a scalable ML system based on human-understandable task decompositions, with supervision of process, not outcomes. This expands our collective understanding of safe AGI architectures.

Visit our Twitter to learn more about how Elicit is helping researchers and making progress on our mission.

Why we're hiring for this role

Since launching the newest version of Elicit last fall, response has been strong. We introduced Elicit 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. To that end, we need a strong front-end engineer who'll help us meet this demand while pushing the bar for quality and user experience even higher. 

Our tech stack

• Frontend: Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind

• Backend: Node and Python

• 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:

• In what situations will a React component re-render?

• What are the differences between flexbox and grid layout in CSS. When would you use each?

• What are Web Workers for and in what situations are they helpful?

• How would you create a drop-shadow effect using Tailwind?

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

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, however, so we ask that all Elicians come together for quarterly team retreat, normally in and around the SF bay area.

What you'll do

• Build Elicit into a product researchers can’t live without

  • You’ll work with a modern front-end stack (React, TypeScript, Chakra, Tailwind) to fully own shipping useful, exciting features out to users on a weekly basis.

  • 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.

• Keep Elicit’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 be the biggest advocate for keeping Elicit’s bar high for smooth user workflows and making sure Elicit looks great and is a delight to use. We want somebody on our team who’ll remain obsessed with a high quality user experience, and can hold us accountable to balancing that with shipping rapidly and pursuing new features.

  • You’ll contribute to discussions around UX, system design, and architecture.

Projects you'll contribute to

You can view some sample projects here.

What you bring to the role

• Strong technical skills that will enable you to move comfortably around our tech stack, with strong computer science fundamentals. (For example, we expect you to be proficient with automated tests, CSS, HTML, Javascript, React, and TypeScript)

• At least a few years of professional experience contributing to software development teams and working on complex web apps. We’re excited for you to unpack your past successes and build off your previous experience at Elicit!

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

• Your past experience or exposure to working with language models. Because of the way language models work, you’re used to writing a lot of asynchronous code and thinking defensively about error handling.

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

Compensation, 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, as long as you’re comfortable traveling 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 (FSA/HSA, too)

• Flexible vacation policy, with a minimum recommendation of 20 days / year and plenty of company holidays

• 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!

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

• Career (L3): $170-245k + equity

• Senior (L4): $185-270k + equity

• Expert (L5): $215-305k + equity

We're optimizing for a hire who can contribute at a L3/career-level or above.

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