{"id":127700,"url":"https://alion.io/job/elicit-machine-learning-engineer","title":"Machine Learning Engineer","company":{"id":48045,"name":"Elicit","domain":"elicit.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/elicit","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":7,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Oakland, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":185000,"max":220000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":220000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA Toolkit","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Tokenization","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2021-01-23T04:35:25Z","employer_posted_date":"2021-01-23","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T07:14:03Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":2093,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":2093},"description":"About Elicit\nElicit is building the reasoning layer for science and decision-making. We use language models to search over 125 million papers, extract data, and surface insights so that researchers, policy-makers, and industry leaders can go from questions to evidence-backed decisions in minutes.\nToday, hundreds of thousands of researchers have used Elicit to speed up literature reviews, automate systematic reviews, and explore new domains. As we expand our impact beyond academic research, we are laying the groundwork for ML systems that are systematic, transparent, and unbounded when reasoning at scale.\nTo do this, Elicit is pioneering supervision of process, not outcomes. Instead of favoring large black-box models, we break complex questions down into human-legible steps and supervise the reasoning process itself. This approach delivers more transparent, defensible answers today and charts a safer path toward advanced AI tomorrow.\nOur vision is ambitious: we’re building the default starting point for understanding and reasoning through any hard question. We invite you to help us build that future.\n(See how people use Elicit today on Twitter; explore our vision in the roadmap.)\nAbout the role\nAs 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.\nThis 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.\nYou’ll work on problems like:\nTurning messy, ambiguous research tasks into clear product experiences\n\nBuilding interfaces and artifacts that help users understand, trust, and act on model outputs, thinking beyond the chat interface while leveraging full model capabilities\n\nCombining language models with external tools, structured and unstructured data, and retrieval systems\n\nImproving quality through building careful evaluations, truth-conducive model environments and tools, and targeted ML modeling where the impact is high\n\nWhat you’ll build\nAgentic harnesses for target assessment, evidence synthesis, and experiment planning that allow models to provide guarantees about their processes\n\nData integrations across literature, scientific databases, customer data, and internal tools\n\nAPIs that customers can use in their own systems\n\nEvaluation systems that help us understand whether a change actually improves user outcomes\n\nTrust and transparency features, like source-quality signals, intermediate reasoning, and better ways to inspect and fix outputs\n\nExample projects\nExamples of projects you could work on:\nBuild a target-assessment workflow that combines literature, genetics, chemistry, clinical, regulatory, and company data into a shareable artifact.\n\nBuild experiment-planning and iteration tools that help researchers decide what to do next and learn from new results.\n\nBuild evidence-monitoring workflows that keep teams up to date through alerts, briefs, and living reports.\n\nBuild enterprise APIs and structured-output pipelines that plug Elicit into customers’ internal systems.\n\nBuild interfaces that make it easier to inspect, trust, and correct model outputs.\n\nBuild workflow-specific evals and quality systems that tell us whether a product change actually helped users.\n\nImprove extraction, reasoning, or search quality with better prompts, better system design, or finetuning when appropriate.\n\nWhat you bring\nA strong software engineering background and can build end-to-end systems, not just scripts or notebooks\n\nFluency with language models to reason well about prompting, retrieval, evals, failure modes, and where (and how) finetuning is or isn’t worth it\n\nStrong product sense and likes turning fuzzy user problems into concrete things people can use\n\nAn excitement to solve difficult, creative problems rather than narrow optimization on well-defined benchmarks\n\nAbility to move across backend, data, and model layers as needed\n\nClear communication with product, design, domain experts, and other engineers\n\nAbility to use coding assistants effectively and thoughtfully, and has adapted their workflow to become much more effective with them\n\nTo get a sense for how some of us look at applications, see this thread. (The short version: Wherever we can, we prefer to directly evaluate work.)\nYou’ll thrive here if you:\nLike shipping user-facing things quickly\n\nEnjoy working on ambiguous problems with a lot of autonomy\n\nCare about product quality and user trust, not just technical novelty\n\nWant to build new kinds of software made possible by language models\n\nAre excited to use AI tools as part of your daily engineering workflow, while still applying strong judgment\n\nWhat we’re not looking for:\nThis is probably not the right role if you mainly want to:\ndo low-level model systems work like CUDA optimization or model serving infrastructure as your primary focus\n\nwork only on research experiments without owning production systems\n\noptimize benchmark numbers without much connection to user workflows or product outcomes\n\nWe 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.\nAm I a good fit?\nConsider these questions:\nHow does a transformer work?\n\nWhat is a tokenizer?\n\nWhat is a decorator in Python?\n\nWhat are generic types?\n\nStrong applicants will find it easy to answer these questions.\nLocation and travel\nWe 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.\nBenefits\nIn addition to working on important problems as part of a happy, productive, and positive team, we also offer great benefits (with some variation based on work location):\nFlexible 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\n\nFully covered health, dental, vision, and life insurance for you, generous coverage for the rest of your family\n\nFlexible vacation policy, with a minimum recommendation of 20 days/year + company holidays\n\n401K with a 6% employer match\n\nEvery Elician receives a $200 monthly wellbeing stipend to spend on whatever supports your health and wellbeing.\n\nA new Mac + $1,000 budget to set up your workstation or home office in your first year, then $500 every year thereafter\n\n$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\n\nA team administrative assistant that you can delegate personal and work tasks to\n\nCommuter benefits, a relocation bonus, and more!\n\nYou can find more reasons to work with us in this thread.\n\nCompensation\nFor all roles at Elicit, we use a data-backed compensation framework to make sure our salaries are market-competitive, equitable, and simple. For this role, we're targeting starting ranges of:\nCareer (L3): $185-220K + equity\n\nSenior (L4): $220-260K + equity\n\nExpert/Staff (L5): $250-320K + significant equity\n\nWe'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.\nWe also offer above-market equity for all roles at Elicit, as well as employee-friendly equity terms.\nJoin us!","description_format":"text","description_chars":7724,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Equity","Flexible schedule","Flexible vacation policy","Home office","Life insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["AI for Science"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2021-01-23T04:35:25Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":6,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.199,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":2093,"expected_fill_days":33,"reasons":["conf:2","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":220000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/elicit-machine-learning-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/elicit-machine-learning-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T08:37:18Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":11462,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":48045},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=48045"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Felicit-machine-learning-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Felicit-machine-learning-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Felicit-machine-learning-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/elicit-machine-learning-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Felicit-machine-learning-engineer"}]}