Design Engineer

About Elicit

Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help professional researchers and high-stakes decision makers break down hard questions, gather evidence from scientific/academic sources, and reason through uncertainty.

What we're aiming for:

1. 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 accessible. People who don't have the tools, expertise, time, or mental energy to make carefully-reasoned decisions on their own can do so with Elicit.

2. Elicit is a scalable ML system based on human-understandable task decompositions, with supervision of process, not outcomes. This expands our collective understanding of safe AGI architectures.

Visit our Twitter to learn more about how Elicit is helping researchers and making progress on our mission.

About the role

Elicit is a small team building research tools used by scientists making high-stakes decisions. We care deeply about the quality of what we ship both in how it works and how it feels.

We're looking for a designer who moves fluidly between Figma and code without friction. You might sketch something in Figma in the morning and open a PR in the afternoon. Both feel natural to you.

What you'll do

You'll work directly with PMs and engineers to shape and refine what ships as a true collaborator. You'll own design problems end to end—from figuring out what to build to getting it shipped. That means Figma when it's the right tool, and code when it's better. You'll sit close to engineering, review implementations, and push back when something doesn't feel right or fix it yourself when you can.

You'll help shapes what "good" means at Elicit—contributing to our design system, participating in critique, and raising the floor on everything we ship.

This is a small team. Your taste will show in what we ship and you'll be one of the people who shapes what "good" means here by contributing to our design system, participating in critique, and raising the floor on everything we ship.

About you

• 3–5 years of product design experience with strong visual sensibility

• You've shipped something you're proud of—a product, a side project, a feature that made it to users

• You're comfortable contributing to a codebase: you've opened PRs, you understand how React components work, you use Tailwind or something like it

• You use AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, v0) as a natural part of your workflow

• Figma is fluent, not effortful

• Genuine care about visual and interaction craft—you notice the details and sweat them

• You can explain your rationale, take feedback, and help a team converge on a decision

• Based in North American time zones. We're primarily Bay Area and do quarterly team retreats in person.

Your first month:

• You'll complete your first multi-issue project

  • Tackle a significant data pipeline optimization or enhancement project.

  • Collaborate with the team to implement improvements in our academic paper processing workflow.

• You're actively improving the team

  • Contribute to regular team meetings and hack days, sharing insights from your data engineering expertise.

  • Add documentation or diagrams explaining our data pipeline architecture and best practices.

  • Suggest improvements to our data processing and storage methodologies.

Your first quarter:

• You're flying solo

  • Independently implement significant enhancements to our data pipeline, improving efficiency and scalability.

  • Make impactful decisions regarding our data architecture and processing strategies.

• You've developed an area of expertise

  • Become the go-to resource for questions related to our academic paper processing pipeline and data infrastructure.

  • Lead discussions on optimizing our data storage and retrieval processes for academic literature.

• You actively research and improve the product

  • Propose and scope improvements to make Elicit more comprehensive and up-to-date in terms of scholarly sources.

  • Identify and implement technical improvements to surpass competitors like Google Scholar in terms of coverage and data quality.

Compensation, 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 can travel for in-person offsites

• 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

• 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!

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:

• $100,000-$250,000 USD + Equity

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