---
title: 'ML Research Resident at Elicit'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ml-research-resident-elicit-oakland-fxt013nvwv6c'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# ML Research Resident at Elicit

- **Company:** Elicit
- **Location:** Oakland, CA
- **Employment:** contract
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2024-12-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/elicit/e04136b7-57e5-44d5-9a7c-cced3e2cb0f8

## Job description

Elicit is building a research agent that can use an unlimited amount of test-time compute while keeping its reasoning transparent and verifiable.

The residency Transformers 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. What 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. What 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. As 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. Developing systems that perform legible reasoning over long horizons addresses core challenges in AI transparency and scalable reasoning.

## About you

Strong candidates will have experience with LLMs, good intuitions about what makes reasoning systematic and verifiable, and care about AI transparency. The 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.

Logistics

- 3-month contract role
- Compensation: $12-15k/month depending on experience
- Location: In-person (Oakland) or remote (US)
- Potential of full-time offer for exceptional candidates

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.

## About Elicit

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Elicit is an AI research assistant that automates time-consuming research tasks such as literature review, data extraction, and synthesis, helping scientists and researchers become more evidence‑based.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Public Benefit Company; Series A stage with $31 M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Oakland, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023 (predecessor lab work began in 2018)
- **Founders**: Andreas Stuhlmüller (CEO) and Jungwon Byun (COO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: AI‑powered Research Services / Scientific Software
- **Target customers**: B2B (pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, enterprises) and B2C (individual researchers); primary users are experts in biomedicine, health economics, computer science, and other evidence‑driven fields.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “To scale up good reasoning for scientists and beyond” – the company is a Public Benefit Corporation that prioritises long‑term positive impact alongside profit.

## Products & Services
- **[Elicit Platform](https://elicit.com/)**: Web‑based AI research assistant. Users ask research questions, and the platform searches over 138 M papers, extracts structured data, and generates research reports with sentence‑level citations. Supports systematic literature reviews compliant with PRISMA 2020.
  **Type**: SaaS (web app)
- **[Elicit Systematic Review](https://elicit.com/)**: A specialised workflow for conducting reproducible, traceable, and auditable systematic reviews. Achieves 95% search recall, 97% abstract screening, and 96% data extraction accuracy.
  **Type**: SaaS (feature of the platform)
- **[Elicit API](https://elicit.com/)**: Programmatic access to Elicit’s search and report generation capabilities, enabling integration into external workflows and custom tools.
  **Type**: API
- **[Elicit Research Agent](https://elicit.com/)**: An autonomous agent that can explore broad topics, create competitive landscapes, and synthesise findings across multiple data sources.
  **Type**: SaaS (feature)
- **[Elicit Alerts](https://elicit.com/)**: A notification system that helps researchers stay current with new publications without inbox overload.
  **Type**: SaaS (feature)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: **Total Funding** – $31 M (Seed $9 M led by Fifty Years, Series A $22 M co‑led by Footwork and Spark Capital); the company has “millions of dollars of recurring revenue” and is growing revenue month over month [elicit.com](https://elicit.com/careers).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Fifty Years, Basis Set, Illusian, Mythos, Julian Capital; angel investors include Tom Preston‑Werner (GitHub co‑founder), Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox co‑founder), Thomas Ebeling (former Novartis CEO), and Jeff Dean (Google Chief Scientist) [elicit.com](https://elicit.com/careers).
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Over 5 million researchers use Elicit, including staff at major universities and enterprises.
  - Employee headcount reached ~40 in mid‑2026, a 40.5% year‑over‑year increase [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/elicit-research).
  - 13 active job postings; subscription model launched 18 months earlier is driving fast recurring‑revenue growth.
  - Recent product releases: Research Agent, API, Systematic Review updates aligned with PRISMA 2020, and a more powerful “Strict Screening” mode.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Accuracy & Trust**: Elicit supports every AI‑generated claim with sentence‑level citations from the underlying papers, and validates its accuracy against Cochrane reviews. It is the most accurate AI product for scientific research [elicit.com](https://elicit.com/).
- **Systematic Review Capabilities**: Unlike general‑purpose AI chatbots, Elicit provides rich, interactive tables and multi‑step workflows that meet rigorous academic standards (e.g., PRISMA 2020).
- **Early Mover & Alignment‑Focused**: Elicit began working with language models in 2018, well before the current AI boom, and is structured as a Public Benefit Company with a mission to advance AI safety through process‑supervised reasoning.
- **Deep Researcher‑Niche Focus**: The product is built specifically for scientists, not general‑purpose use, creating strong retention and domain‑specific defensibility.

## Strategic Focus
- **Product Expansion**: Continuously adding new features (Research Agents, API, Alerts) to cover the full research workflow from discovery to report generation.
- **Enterprise & International Growth**: Hiring Enterprise Account Executives for both US and EMEA regions, indicating a push into large institutional contracts and global markets.
- **Scaling Revenue**: The company is “growing fast” with millions in recurring revenue and aims to accelerate feature shipping to meet demand from paying subscribers [elicit.com](https://elicit.com/careers/aa99e2e9-5b15-4cd3-ac9d-9c9177ff61c8).
- **AI Safety & Alignment**: Continues to advance methods for building scalable ML systems with human‑understandable task decompositions, contributing to long‑term safe AGI research.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: High‑agency, low‑bureaucracy environment where “everyone takes ownership and avoids egos and status games.” The team values transparency, truth‑seeking, and continuous growth. Cross‑team collaboration is the norm [elicit.com](https://elicit.com/careers).
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Flexible – team members can work from the Oakland office or remotely within time zones between GMT and GMT‑8. Quarterly in‑person company offsites are expected (travel 4+ times per year). Minimal meetings and no micromanagement [elicit.com](https://elicit.com/careers).
- **Compensation & Benefits**: 
  - Competitive salaries (e.g., Senior Software Engineer $185‑270K + equity).
  - Full coverage health, dental, vision, and life insurance for employee and generous family coverage.
  - 20 weeks paid parental leave (12 weeks fully paid).
  - 401K with 6% employer match.
  - $1,000 quarterly AI experimentation & learning budget.
  - Flexible PTO with recommended minimum 20 days/year.
  - New Mac + $1,000 workstation budget in first year, $500 annually thereafter.
  - Team administrative assistant available for personal/work tasks [elicit.com](https://elicit.com/careers/aa99e2e9-5b15-4cd3-ac9d-9c9177ff61c8).
- **Engineering Culture**: Engineers work directly with LLM experts; the company predates the AI bubble, offering deep learning opportunities. The stack is ML‑heavy, and engineers ship user‑facing features weekly. Roles include ML Engineer, Frontend Engineer, AI Engineer, and Evaluation Engineer.
- **Potential Downsides**: High ambiguity as an early‑stage startup; projects shift frequently. Self‑direction is expected; close mentorship is limited. Limited management track (few direct reports) – the team is intentionally kept small.

## Sources
1. [elicit.com](https://elicit.com/) – Main product page
2. [elicit.com/careers](https://elicit.com/careers) – Careers page with culture, benefits, investor list
3. [elicit.com/team](https://elicit.com/team) – Team and leadership page
4. [linkedin.com/company/elicit-research](https://www.linkedin.com/company/elicit-research) – LinkedIn company profile (headcount, funding, locations)
5. [elicit.com/careers/aa99e2e9-5b15-4cd3-ac9d-9c9177ff61c8](https://elicit.com/careers/aa99e2e9-5b15-4cd3-ac9d-9c9177ff61c8) – Senior Software Engineer job posting (compensation, benefits, engineering culture)

## Other roles at Elicit

- [Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-engineer-elicit-oakland-s1arcr5hndkw) — Oakland, CA
- [Engineering Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-elicit-oakland-426esgz1dm9r) — Oakland, CA
- [Growth](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-elicit-oakland-zzw838hhezfq) — Oakland, CA
- [Enterprise Account Executive - EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-emea-elicit-remote-mfj7x8b2zkws)
- [Enterprise Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-elicit-oakland-esdxnq1dv6ag) — Oakland, CA
- [AI Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-engineer-elicit-oakland-nxjht42w98aq) — Oakland, CA
- [General interest](https://feeny.ai/job/general-interest-elicit-oakland-wq080errqp66) — Oakland, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-elicit-oakland-fxdq7zz9cexa) — Oakland, CA
- [Machine Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-elicit-oakland-3w8qcwrjt5z1) — Oakland, CA