Machine Learning Engineer

Machine Learning Engineer As a Machine Learning Engineer at Elicit, you'll build products and workflows that help researchers and scientific teams make higher quality decisions with language models.

This is not a role for someone who only wants to develop models in isolation from user impact. A large part of the work is software engineering: building product experiences, APIs, data integrations, evaluation systems, and reliable harnesses that make language models reliably useful and trustworthy in high-stakes domains.

You'll work on problems like:

Turning messy, ambiguous research tasks into clear product experiences

Building interfaces and artifacts that help users understand, trust, and act on model outputs, thinking beyond the chat interface while leveraging full model capabilities

Combining language models with external tools, structured and unstructured data, and retrieval systems

Improving quality through building careful evaluations, truth-conducive model environments and tools, and targeted ML modeling where the impact is high

What you'll build includes:

Agentic harnesses for target assessment, evidence synthesis, and experiment planning that allow models to provide guarantees about their processes

Data integrations across literature, scientific databases, customer data, and internal tools

APIs that customers can use in their own systems

Evaluation systems that help us understand whether a change actually improves user outcomes

Trust and transparency features, like source-quality signals, intermediate reasoning, and better ways to inspect and fix outputs

Examples of projects you could work on:

Build a target-assessment workflow that combines literature, genetics, chemistry, clinical, regulatory, and company data into a shareable artifact.

Build experiment-planning and iteration tools that help researchers decide what to do next and learn from new results.

Build evidence-monitoring workflows that keep teams up to date through alerts, briefs, and living reports.

Build enterprise APIs and structured-output pipelines that plug Elicit into customers' internal systems.

Build interfaces that make it easier to inspect, trust, and correct model outputs.

Build workflow-specific evals and quality systems that tell us whether a product change actually helped users.

Improve extraction, reasoning, or search quality with better prompts, better system design, or finetuning when appropriate.

What you bring includes:

A strong software engineering background and can build end-to-end systems, not just scripts or notebooks

Fluency with language models to reason well about prompting, retrieval, evals, failure modes, and where (and how) finetuning is or isn't worth it

Strong product sense and likes turning fuzzy user problems into concrete things people can use

An excitement to solve difficult, creative problems rather than narrow optimization on well-defined benchmarks

Ability to move across backend, data, and model layers as needed

Clear communication with product, design, domain experts, and other engineers

Ability to use coding assistants effectively and thoughtfully, and has adapted their workflow to become much more effective with them

You'll thrive here if you:

Like shipping user-facing things quickly

Enjoy working on ambiguous problems with a lot of autonomy

Care about product quality and user trust, not just technical novelty

Want to build new kinds of software made possible by language models

Are excited to use AI tools as part of your daily engineering workflow, while still applying strong judgment

What we're not looking for:

Do low-level model systems work like CUDA optimization or model serving infrastructure as your primary focus

Work only on research experiments without owning production systems

Optimize benchmark numbers without much connection to user workflows or product outcomes

We do care about model quality, evals, and sometimes finetuning. But those matter because they help us build products users can rely on, not as ends in themselves.

Consider these questions:

How does a transformer work?

What is a tokenizer?

What is a decorator in Python?

What are generic types?

Strong applicants will find it easy to answer these questions.

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.

Benefits:

Flexible work environment - work from our office in Oakland or remotely as long as you can travel to work in-person for retreats and coworking events

Fully covered health, dental, vision, and life insurance for you, generous coverage for the rest of your family

Flexible vacation policy, with a minimum recommendation of 20 days/year + company holidays

401K with a 6% employer match

Every Elician receives a $200 monthly wellbeing stipend to spend on whatever supports your health and wellbeing.

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 that you can delegate personal and work tasks to

Commuter benefits, a relocation bonus, and more!

You can find more reasons to work with us in this thread.

Compensation:

Career (L3): $185-220K + equity

Senior (L4): $220-260K + equity

Expert/Staff (L5): $250-320K + significant equity

We're optimizing for a hire who can contribute at a L4/senior-level or above. We'd love to meet staff/principal level contributors as well.

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