Engineering Manager
Why we’re hiring for this role ----------------------------------
Elicit is growing. We currently have 20 engineers and only two people managers. This role is crucially important to ensure that our world-class engineers are given the opportunity to do the best work of their career here.
We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to help us scale our team without sacrificing the speed, technical excellence, and ownership that epitomize how we build products.
This role is more of a coach than a player. It’s important you are sufficiently technically-engaged to steward wise architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and help unblock difficult technical problems. However, your primary impact will be through building and motivating a high-performing team rather than individual contributions in code.
You, your team, and your product counterpart will own outcomes, not just a roadmap. Roadmaps are hypotheses: when reality diverges, we expect you to notice, question, and change course.
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 ------------------------------
We’re looking for someone who combines outstanding people leadership with excellent technical judgment.
- 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 a high-performing team of about 7 engineers, with the remit of making Elicit the daily driver research tool for research teams.
- Attract, source, and hire excellent engineers.
- 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.
Your first week -------------------
- Meet your team, understand the in-flight work, familiarise yourself with our product direction.
- Ship a small feature or bug fix to see the engineering process end-to-end.
- Participate in technical design discussions and code reviews.
- Start building relationships through regular one-on-ones.
- Pair extensively with engineers across the team to get to know the tech stack and your colleagues.
Your first month --------------------
- Take ownership of your team’s planning and delivery.
- Establish a regular coaching cadence with each engineer.
- Lead sprint planning, prioritization, and execution for your team’s roadmap.
- Identify opportunities to improve engineering quality, process, or developer experience
Your first quarter ----------------------
- Your team is consistently delivering high-quality work; the impact of this work is measured and aligned with Elicit’s strategy.
- Engineers on your team have clear growth plans and are making tangible progress.
- You’ve earned the trust of the engineering organization through sound technical judgment and thoughtful leadership.
- You’ve helped raise the engineering bar through hiring, coaching, architecture, or process improvements.
- You’re operating independently as the owner of an important area of Elicit’s engineering organization.
What we’re looking for beyond technical ability ---------------------------------------------------
The qualities that matter most at Elicit include:
- Honesty and integrity.
- Analytical rigor.
- Rapid iteration.
- Bias toward action.
- Strong communication.
- Intellectual curiosity.
- Persistence.
- Proactivity.
- Openness to criticism and new ideas.
- Excellent people management.
- Strong hiring instincts.
- Technical judgment.
- Product sense.
Location and travel -------------------
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.
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’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
- You can find more reasons to work with us in this thread!
Compensation ------------
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:
- $250k -300k + equity
We offer above-market equity for all roles at Elicit, as well as employee-friendly equity terms.
About Elicit
Elicit uses language models to help users automate research workflows.
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