{"id":534175,"url":"https://alion.io/job/elicit-ml-research-resident","title":"ML Research Resident","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":"D","score":52,"open_postings":10,"ghost_share":0.8,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-31T05:58:55Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"contractor","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Oakland, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":12000,"max":15000,"currency":"USD","period":"month","gross":null,"usd_annual":180000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Transformers","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2024-12-13T02:00:55Z","employer_posted_date":"2024-12-13","last_verified_at":"2026-10-31T16:55:40Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":687,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":687},"description":"Elicit is building a research agent that can use an unlimited amount of test-time compute while keeping its reasoning transparent and verifiable.\nThe residency\nTransformers do a fixed amount of computation per token, and the quality of work degrades rapidly when they are applied iteratively. As research resident, you'll work with us for 3 months on developing computational procedures (operators) that can reliably improve a knowledge state over thousands of iterations.\nWhat is a knowledge state? A knowledge state consists of structured information - for example, a scientific paper might be represented as a set of claims supported by evidence and connected through logical reasoning; this might be combined with scratchpads, evergreen “notes to self”, search trees, and other information.\nWhat counts as improvement? Like scientists, we want LLMs to make genuine progress in understanding - separating inferences from raw evidence, finding connections between ideas, building clearer explanations, and identifying gaps in reasoning. But unlike typical ML systems that are often trained to do “whatever works”, we need improvements that are epistemically sound - each step should make the knowledge state more useful while remaining human-readable. An improvement might reorganize information to better answer a question, find an implicit assumption in an argument, or connect evidence across multiple sources.\nAs research resident, your work will focus on designing and testing improvement operators that maintain stability over 1000+ iterations while making genuine progress. You'll start with simple cases (e.g., shallow refactoring of scientific papers) and demonstrate reliable iteration before scaling to more complex reasoning tasks.\nDeveloping systems that perform legible reasoning over long horizons addresses core challenges in AI transparency and scalable reasoning.\nAbout you\nStrong candidates will have experience with LLMs, good intuitions about what makes reasoning systematic and verifiable, and care about AI transparency.\nThe best applicants will additionally have a strong software engineering background and concrete examples of how they've applied this background to come up with novel abstractions that push the frontiers of automated reasoning.\nLogistics\n3-month contract role\n\nCompensation: $12-15k/month depending on experience\n\nLocation: In-person (Oakland) or remote (US)\n\nPotential of full-time offer for exceptional candidates\n\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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":2737,"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":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["AI for Science"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-08T07:29:28Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":4,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.127,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":687,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","ghost","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-31T05:58:55Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":180000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/elicit-ml-research-resident","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/elicit-ml-research-resident.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-31T18:14:47Z","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":28464,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-01T00:00:00Z"}},"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-ml-research-resident"},{"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-ml-research-resident"},{"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-ml-research-resident"},{"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-ml-research-resident\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Felicit-ml-research-resident"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":534175}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"elicit.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":534175},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}