Senior Software 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 https://ought.org/updates/2022-04-06-process. This expands our collective understanding of safe AGI architectures. Visit our Twitter https://twitter.com/elicitorgto learn more about how Elicit is helping researchers and making progress on our mission. WHY WE'RE HIRING FOR THIS ROLE Elicit has grown fast. We now have over 2 million users, and our subscription tiers from Plus to Enterprise are used daily by scientists and by teams at the top pharma and life sciences companies. We're moving from a tool people visit to an environment they live in, which means building agentic features, orchestrating LLMs over millions of papers, and keeping latency low without losing the rigor our users trust. We're looking to bring on another strong senior engineer to own hard problems across the stack, ship new functionality quickly, and help us scale the infrastructure behind it. [https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/797554ae-ec94-4cd4-8a92-0ca2488582e0/d389e684-948e-434b-832d-9e3185875588/elicit-team-1.jpeg] WHAT YOU'LL OWN - Build Elicit into a product researchers can’t live without - You’ll 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 contribute to discussions around UX, system design, and architecture. PROJECTS YOU'LL CONTRIBUTE TO You can view sample projects here. https://airtable.com/app9at9MxvT5VQbss/shrQuCIjP76cjJVzE WHAT YOU BRING TO THE ROLE - Strong technical aptitude that allows you to move comfortably around our tech stack, both back-end and front-end, with strong computer science fundamentals. - Professional experience contributing to software development teams at a mid-career to senior level. 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 complex 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. OUR TECH STACK - Backend: Node and Python - Frontend: Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind - 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 these questions: 1. What are a couple of different ways to write concurrent code in Python? 2. What are the differences between var, let, and const in