What you’ll own
Build and grow a high-performing engineering team
- Directly manage a team of up to 8 software engineers.
- Coach engineers through technical growth, career development, and increasing ownership.
- Build a culture of high standards, rapid iteration, and thoughtful execution.
- Help identify, hire, onboard, and develop exceptional engineers.
Ship ambitious and successful product features
- Partner closely with product, designers, and fellow engineers to prioritize tactical and strategic goals into an audacious roadmap.
- Own the execution of a significant portion of Elicit’s roadmap.
- Balance shipping quickly against building systems that remain maintainable as Elicit grows.
- Remove execution bottlenecks and ensure the team consistently delivers high-quality work.
Raise our engineering bar
- Participate in architectural discussions and technical planning.
- Review code and provide thoughtful technical feedback.
- Help engineers make strong engineering tradeoffs around performance, reliability, scalability, and simplicity.
- Actively improve engineering processes, tooling, and team effectiveness.
Multiply the impact of the team
- Develop engineers into increasingly independent technical leaders.
- Give actionable feedback through regular coaching and performance management.
- Foster a collaborative environment where engineers learn from one another and continuously improve.
- Guide the team towards wise use of coding agents: pushing for ambitious use while staying honest about what's actually saving time. Ensure that your team develops the skills to grow into this new way of working rather than being diminished by it.
What you bring to the role
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
- 3+ years directly managing software engineers.
- Experience leading engineering teams at high-bar startups.
- Strong computer science fundamentals and the technical depth to earn the trust of senior engineers.
- Experience shipping complex, user-facing products with measurable business impact.
- A track record of helping engineers grow through coaching, mentorship, and clear feedback.
- Strong communication skills and an ability to collaborate across engineering, product, and design.
- Profound curiosity about language models, AI, and building products that improve reasoning and decision-making.
Scope expectations: Candidates are likely not a fit if their most recent experience is primarily organizational leadership at scale (for example, Head of Engineering, VP Engineering, or Senior Director at large organizations), or if they’ve been removed from hands-on engineering management for several years. Founders, CTOs, or engineering leaders from seed or Series A startups who remained close to the code are excellent fits.
What you’ll actually do
- Lead and develop a small, high-performing team of engineers, initially 2–3 people and growing over time.
- Drive execution across complex product initiatives.
- Partner closely with product, design, and research to turn ambiguous ideas into shipped software.
- Give thoughtful feedback, coaching, and career guidance.
- Participate in architecture discussions, system design reviews, and technical planning.
- Improve how the team works rather than becoming another pair of hands on the keyboard.
- Raise the quality bar for engineering and AI-assisted development.
You’d be especially successful if you…
- Enjoy helping engineers grow even more than writing code yourself.
- Care deeply about engineering craftsmanship without slowing delivery.
- Can comfortably switch between coaching a teammate, reviewing architecture, and discussing product priorities in the same afternoon.
- Prefer high-agency, low-process environments.
- Are motivated by improving science, reasoning, and the long-term impact of AI.
Benefits and perks
- Flexible work environment: work from our office in Oakland or remotely with time zone overlap (between GMT and GMT-8), as long as you’re comfortable traveling for quarterly in-person offsites.
- Fully covered health, dental, vision, and life insurance for you, generous coverage for the rest of your family (FSA/HSA, too).
- Flexible vacation policy, with a minimum recommendation of 20 days / year and plenty of company holidays.
- Every Elician receives a $200 monthly wellbeing stipend to spend on whatever supports your health and wellbeing.
- 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.
Compensation: For this role, we target starting ranges of: $250k -300k + equity. We offer above-market equity for all roles at Elicit, as well as employee-friendly equity terms.
ElicitOakland, CA
