Design Engineer
$100k - $250k USD
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:
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.
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.
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.