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Model Behavior Engineer, Reasoning and Decision Making

Elicit· Engineering
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Remote$185k - $220kFull-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Role focused on understanding and improving how AI systems reason and make decisions under uncertainty, with emphasis on evaluation, experimentation, and software design to make reasoning processes inspectable and trustworthy.

Responsibilities

  • Understand the decisions we're helping people make. Work through real cases with users and domain experts. Identify their objectives, constraints, available evidence, and important unknowns. Learn enough about an unfamiliar problem to recognize when an answer misses the point.
  • Define and measure good reasoning. Build evaluations for problems where success is initially underspecified. Combine close inspection of examples, expert judgment, and quantitative analysis. Investigate whether a better score reflects a meaningful improvement, and whether that improvement holds on new cases.
  • Improve the system's behavior. Turn observed failures into hypotheses you can test. Experiment with problem decomposition, context, tools, and ways for agents to seek information or check their work. Follow promising results through to changes users can benefit from.
  • Design the software that makes this work reliable. Choose useful abstractions, data structures, and component boundaries for reasoning workflows and evaluations. Make deliberate tradeoffs among simplicity, flexibility, reliability, latency, and cost. Build systems whose failures you and your teammates can diagnose.
  • Own the quality of what you ship. Write maintainable code, participate in design and code reviews, and test and monitor your changes. Work with other engineers to integrate your systems into the product and improve them as you learn from real use.

Qualifications

  • Rigorous thinking about ambiguous problems.
  • Curiosity across domains and clear communication.
  • Good experimental instincts.
  • The ability to implement your ideas.
  • Practical familiarity with language models.
  • Strong engineering and architectural judgment.
  • Effective use of coding assistants.

Skills

Required:Problem formulation and objective discoveryExperimental design and evaluationSoftware design for reasoning workflowsPython programmingLanguage model familiarity

Benefits

  • Flexible work environment - work from Oakland office or remotely
  • Fully covered health, dental, vision, and life insurance for you and generous coverage for family (FSA/HSA)
  • Flexible vacation policy with minimum 20 days/year
  • $200 monthly wellbeing stipend
  • 401K with a 6% employer match
  • Mac + $1,000 workstation setup budget in first year (+$500/year thereafter)
  • $1,000 quarterly AI Experimentation & Learning budget
  • Team administrative assistant
  • In-person team retreats and other in-person collaboration opportunities
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Elicit

AI for scientific research

Use AI to search, summarize, extract data from, and chat with over 125 million papers. Used by over 2 million researchers in academia and industry.

AIscientific researchliterature reviewdata extractionclinical trialsresearch collaboration
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