Elicit

ML Research Resident

Oakland, CA (or remote within US timezones) · Contract

Sponsorship not specified$12k-$15kDetected 586 days ago

Machine LearningNLPLLMsResearch

About the role

THE RESIDENCY Transformers do a fixed amount of computation per token, and the quality of work degrades rapidly when they are applied iteratively.
But unlike typical ML systems that are often trained to do "whatever works", we need improvements that are epistemically sound - each step should make the knowledge state more useful while remaining human-readable.
An improvement might reorganize information to better answer a question, find an implicit assumption in an argument, or connect evidence across multiple sources.

Elicit is building a research agent that can use an unlimited amount of test-time compute while keeping its reasoning transparent and verifiable.
As research resident, you'll work with us for 3 months on developing computational procedures (operators) that can reliably improve a knowledge state over thousands of iterations.
Like scientists, we want LLMs to make genuine progress in understanding - separating inferences from raw evidence, finding connections between ideas, building clearer explanations, and identifying gaps in reasoning.
As research resident, your work will focus on designing and testing improvement operators that maintain stability over 1000+ iterations while making genuine progress.
Developing systems that perform legible reasoning over long horizons addresses core challenges in AI transparency and scalable reasoning.

$12-15k/month depending on experience
Potential of full-time offer for exceptional candidates
We have a great office in Oakland, CA, and we'd love to see you there if you're local.
That said, we're just as happy for you to work remotely.
We do get the whole team together for a quarterly retreat somewhere fun, because in-person time matters to us.

This listing is sourced directly from Elicit's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.