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
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
Elicit is an AI research platform used by scientists, pharma companies, and decision-makers for high-stakes evidence synthesis. A single session could trigger hundreds of thousands of language model invocations across multiple providers, which means our infrastructure decisions directly impact cost, reliability, and the quality of research outcomes for users making decisions worth millions of dollars
Our infra is well-architected using best practices — Terraform, Kubernetes, Argo CD, GitHub Actions. But we're at an inflection point: enterprise contracts are getting larger, single-tenant deployments are multiplying, and the surface area that needs dedicated attention has outgrown what our current team can cover part-time. This is the first dedicated infrastructure hire and you'll define how this function works at Elicit
James (Head of Engineering, ex-Square) set up the original infrastructure and will be your close partner. This role will own and evolve the infrastructure platform that underpins Elicit's product. You will ensuring it is reliable, secure, cost-efficient, and ready for the demands of a growing enterprise customer base. Under your ownership, our systems will scale gracefully across single-tenant deployments, our SLAs will be backed by real engineering rigor rather than best intentions, and our compliance posture will be a selling point rather than an afterthought
A private cloud deployment is a ~1-day turnkey operation. Playbooks and templated Terraform make standing up Elicit in a customer's cloud routine, which opens up 8-figure enterprise deals
Our observability signal:noise ratio improves 10-fold. Health monitors cover every endpoint and job, and an alert firing means something needs attention
Disaster recovery is practiced. We run database restoration drills and provider-outage dry runs on a schedule, with post-mortems that make the whole team better at diagnosis
Our SLAs are backed by engineering rigor. We follow through on SOC 2, NIST AI framework, and EU Cyber Resilience commitments, and enterprise security reviews go faster because of it
Inference is faster and cheaper. You've found and executed opportunities like shifting load between providers to cut p95 latency and cost at the same time
James (Head of Engineering): set up the original infrastructure and will be your closest partner. You'll own execution, with James as sounding board and advocate
Panda: the engineer who has been covering infrastructure part-time, with deep context on our cluster bootstrapping, Cloudflare setup, and inference providers
Product: PMs covering the core product, ML, and evals. They carry the customer side of enterprise deployments, so you'll work together to turn requirements like data residency, compliance commitments, and SLAs into architecture, and to weigh the cost and latency tradeoffs behind product decisions. Eval infrastructure is a shared surface with Ben, from CI integration to inference capacity
The whole engineering team: we're ~30 people company-wide, so you'll work directly with the engineers whose developer experience you're improving, and pair with them where infrastructure meets application code
Andreas and Jungwon (cofounders): you'll meet both during the interview process, and infrastructure decisions with strategic weight (enterprise deployments, compliance posture) get their direct attention
On-call & incident expectations
We don't have a formal on-call rotation yet. Incidents today are handled by the engineers closest to the affected system. Part of this role is building the incident response practice we should have: sensible alerting, SLA tracking, structured post-mortems, and eventually a rotation designed so it doesn't burn anyone out. You'd design the on-call setup you'll then live with
Why join us?
The work matters. Our mission is to radically improve reasoning for high-stakes decisions. Over 2 million people use Elicit, including pharma teams making R&D decisions worth tens of millions of dollars, and the reliability of our platform is part of what makes those decisions sound
Infrastructure work is close to the business. Single-tenant deployments open enterprise deals, and inference routing choices show up directly in our costs and latency. You'll see the effect of your work in the company's trajectory
Built for the long term. We're a Public Benefit Corporation that spun out of a non-profit AI research lab. Long-term impact and AI safety are part of the corporate charter
High agency, low bureaucracy. ~30 curious, slightly weird people who write things down and trust each other to run with a vague brief
Serious investment in your growth. $1,000 per quarter for every person to explore AI tools, courses, and events, plus quarterly in-person team retreats
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