Infrastructure Engineer

Elicit • Oakland, CA

1d • $185,000 - $280,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on infrastructure/SRE/platform engineering experience.
• An AI-native way of working. Agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, etc.) are how we build at Elicit, and infrastructure is no exception: agents help us write IaC and investigate incidents. You should be an enthusiastic practitioner who uses AI to multiply your impact, and excited to find new places agents can safely take on infrastructure work.
• Solid Terraform experience. this is our primary infrastructure-as-code layer and the most important technical requirement.
• Strong Kubernetes expertise. You've operated production clusters, not just deployed to them. Comfortable with EKS, networking, autoscaling (Karpenter), and debugging cluster-level issues.
• AWS experience (primary), with GCP familiarity a plus.
• GitOps and CI/CD fluency. Argo CD, GitHub Actions, or equivalent. You understand deployment automation, rollback strategies, and change management.
• SRE mindset. You've built or significantly improved observability stacks (DataDog or equivalent), incident response processes, and on-call practices.
• Security and compliance awareness. Experience with SOC 2 or similar frameworks, SIEM tooling, and translating compliance requirements into engineering practice.
• Ability to write software. You can contribute to our backend codebases where infrastructure meets application logic.

Nice To Haves

• Bonus: you've written about, spoken about, or built projects demonstrating this [AI-native way of working].
• Familiarity with GCP.

Responsibilities

• 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 response practice — proactive monitoring, alerting, SLA tracking, and structured post-mortems that make the whole team better at diagnosing and resolving issues.
• Drive compliance and security operations — ensure we follow through on the policies we've written (SOC 2, NIST AI framework, EU Cyber Resilience). Own disaster recovery exercises, database restoration drills, and security event monitoring (SIEM).
• Manage infrastructure cost and capacity — make smart decisions about where we run workloads (AWS, CoreWeave, Parasail), optimize spend, and plan capacity as usage grows.
• Improve developer experience — CI/CD pipeline performance, preview environments, local development tooling, and deployment confidence.
• Contribute to backend systems where infrastructure and application intersect — circuit breakers, inference routing, data connector infrastructure for enterprise customers bringing their own data.

Benefits

• 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 minimum 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed