Senior Software Enginer, Data and Integrations

Elicit•Oakland, CA

3h•$185,000 - $305,000

About The Position

Elicit is hiring a senior-level or higher software engineer to own and improve its scholarly search and data platform. The role focuses on the distributed systems that build and update the search corpus, making new data sources repeatably integrable, and turning publisher and enterprise requirements into secure, dependable product features. It is product engineering with a strong data-systems core, not an analytics or BI role. The position is full-stack: work spans Elicit’s Next.js and React frontend, TypeScript and Python services, and APIs connecting the product to its data layer. The engineer will bring scholarly literature, clinical trials, specialised scientific databases, licensed publisher content, and customers’ private data into cited, agentic research workflows while preserving structure, citations, and provenance. The role works closely with product, sales, partners, customers, and the engineering team. It includes planning the technical direction for the area, delivering features from initial brief through production, operating and monitoring systems after launch, and making the data platform easier for other engineers to build on. Elicit is a public benefit corporation with a small, AI-native engineering team. The position may be based remotely or in the Oakland office; remote employees need time-zone overlap between GMT and GMT-8 and must be comfortable traveling for quarterly team offsites.

Requirements

At least 5 years of software engineering experience, including ownership of production systems and independent architecture decisions.
Strong Python skills; the role uses Python daily and interviews include live coding.
Working knowledge of TypeScript.
Experience designing, debugging, and tuning distributed data pipelines or comparable distributed systems experience.
Solid SQL and practical knowledge of partitioning, joins, columnar formats, and how data layout affects performance and cost.
Experience integrating external data with challenges such as APIs, bulk exports, file drops, changing schemas, rate limits, partial failures, and overlapping records.
Attention to data quality, entity resolution, provenance, observability, and failure planning.
Experience shipping user-facing features end to end, not only building underlying systems.
Product judgment and ability to connect infrastructure work to user outcomes and work across layers to complete features.
At least one year at an early- or growth-stage company where the candidate helped shape the work.
Clear communication with technical and nontechnical audiences, including sharing proposals early, explaining trade-offs, and persisting with difficult questions.
Pragmatic use of coding agents that increases speed without reducing quality.

Nice To Haves

React experience.
Spark experience.

Responsibilities

Own the scholarly search and data platform, including its coverage, freshness, quality, reliability, and cost as the product and its sources change.
Translate customer and business needs into a technical plan, working closely with product, sales, and partners.
Integrate new kinds of evidence into Elicit and make them useful to LLM-based features while preserving structure, citations, and provenance.
Build secure, rights-aware integrations for enterprise customers and content partners, translating access, privacy, isolation, and auditability requirements into product behavior.
Deliver features from a loose brief through production across frontend, backend, and data, with interfaces between layers that can be changed safely.
Ship in small increments with staged rollouts, monitoring, and rollback plans; operate the systems built and observe how people use them.
Keep integrations from adding unjustified complexity and work on product features beyond integrations with the rest of engineering.
Make the data platform easy for other engineers to build on.
Use coding agents daily and carefully review their output, while staying hands-on where stakes are high.

Benefits

Fully covered health, dental, vision, and life insurance for the employee, with generous family coverage.
FSA/HSA.
Flexible vacation policy, with a minimum recommendation of 20 days per year.
Company holidays.
$200 monthly wellbeing stipend.
401(k) with a 6% employer match.
A new Mac and a $1,000 workstation or home-office setup budget in the first year, followed by $500 each year thereafter.
$1,000 quarterly AI Experimentation & Learning budget for AI tools, courses, educational resources, or AI-focused conferences and events.
Team administrative assistant who can help with personal and work tasks.
Equity, with employee-friendly 10-year exercise periods.