AI Engineer

About the role

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.

WHAT IS AN "AI ENGINEER"?

AI engineering is a new category of technical work. Its emergence is linked to the increasing availability of powerful new artificial intelligence tools: notably generative machine learning systems like large language models.

The term was suggested by swyx on the Latent Space podcast https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer and we've written about it on our blog before.

Elicit predicted the rise of powerful ML systems even before GPT-1 was trained, and has the deepest experience of building trustworthy, capable, and transparent applications using these tools.

If you're a software engineer who relishes the more difficult parts of backend code—like concurrency, fault-tolerance, and distributed systems—you could be a great AI engineer.

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.

We believe that building great AI-powered products requires excellence across multiple parts of the tech stack: from frontend UX to infrastructure. But one of the crux areas is certainly how we prompt, invoke, respond to, and manage the suite of different ML models required to make Elicit work. This is what an AI engineer will be responsible for at Elicit.

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OUR TECH STACK

- Backend: Node and Python.

- Frontend: Next.js and TypeScript (we expect you to be 80+% focussed on backend work, however).

- We like static type checking in Python and TypeScript

- All infrastructure runs in Kubernetes across a couple of clouds