Product Designer
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:
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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
As a Product Designer at Elicit, you'll take complex problems and design elegant solutions to redefine how researchers make progress against their most pressing questions. We're a cross-functional team that values real-time collaboration and rapid prototyping—much of your day-to-day will be transforming big ideals into simple, elegant solutions.
Research tools are our doorway to understanding the world, where scientists work through systematic reviews, evaluate drug targets, and make high-stakes decisions that affect patient outcomes. On their own, these tools don't help organize the chaos of academic literature, bring focus to multi-month research projects, or unlock new ways to synthesize evidence. We believe AI research assistants can do so much more: it can empower researchers to work faster, think deeper, and stay curious. That's why we're building Elicit, a tool that helps researchers do their best work.
What you'll do
Own product design end-to-end. You'll lead projects from problem definition through shipped product—wireframes, prototypes, high-fidelity designs, and iteration based on what you learn.
Prototype and explore rapidly. We value learning through making. You'll explore ideas quickly, share work early, and use hi-fi designs and prototypes to drive alignment and decision-making.
Collaborate across functions. Design doesn't happen in isolation here and you'll partner daily with engineers and PMs to shape what we build and how we build it.
Develop deep domain intuition. Great research tools require understanding researcher workflows. You'll build expertise in how researchers and scientists actually work and use that knowledge to inform product direction.
Elevate team craft. Participate in critiques, contribute to and up-level design systems, and help establish practices that raise quality across everything we ship.
About you
4+ years designing complex, information-rich software—ideally products where users are doing real work, not just browsing
Demonstrated ability to ship from zero to one; you've taken ambiguous problems and delivered polished, functional products
Strong visual design skills paired with systems thinking—you sweat the details but also see how pieces connect
Comfort with ambiguity and speed; you design and prototype to learn and advance decisions
Experience with Figma and designing with LLMs on a canvas or in code
Clear communication and structured thinking—you can explain your rationale, receive feedback openly, and help teams converge on decisions
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Based in North American time zones. We're primarily Bay Area and do quarterly team retreats in person.
Your first month:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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:
$150,000-$250,000 USD + Equity
We're optimizing for a hire who can contribute at a L4/senior-level or above.
We also offer above-market equity for all roles at Elicit, as well as employee-friendly equity terms.
