Infrastructure Engineer

The posting, as Elicit wrote it

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

• 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 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 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.

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WHAT YOU'LL OWN

• Own our cloud infrastructure across AWS and GCP — Kubernetes clusters, networking, databases (Aurora PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB Atlas), Cloudflare, and our CI/CD pipeline.
• Scale single-tenant deployments from a handful to many — each with distinct data retention, geographic, monitoring, and compliance requirements. Make a private cloud deployment a repeatable, low-overhead operation.
• Build our observability and incident

[…]
t 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 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 with time zone overlap (between GMT and GMT-8), as long as you’re comfortable traveling for quarterly in-person offsites.
• 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 recommendation of 20 days / year and plenty of company holidays.
• Every Elician receives a $200 monthly wellbeing stipend to spend on whatever supports your health and wellbeing.
• 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 https://twitter.com/stuhlmueller/status/1694059800408269091!

COMPENSATION

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 target starting ranges of:

• Senior (L4): $185-260k + equity
• Expert (L5): $250-280k + equity
• Principal (L6): >$260 + significant equity

We're optimizing for a hire who can contribute at a L4/senior-level or above.

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