Senior Data Platform Engineer — Remote

OpenKrill; United States; Hybrid; USD 185,000 - 305,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work environment (Oakland or

Health, dental, vision, and life for你

Flexible vacation: 20 days/year

Wellbeing stipend $200 monthly

401K with 6% match

Mac + workstation budget $1,000 first年

AI Experimentation budget $1,000/yr

Administrative assistant

Quarterly in-person offsites

Job summary

Elicit is hiring for a product-focused software engineer to own and evolve the scholarly search and data platform. You will improve distributed data pipelines, enable new evidence sources, and build enterprise-ready integrations with a focus on data quality, provenance, and observability.

The role spans frontend, backend, and data work, with a hands-on approach to coding agents and end-to-end features, and a flexible hybrid/remote setup from the Oakland area.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering, including production systems you owned and architecture decisions you made.
• Strong Python. You'll use it every day, and our interviews include live coding.
• Experience designing, debugging, and tuning distributed data pipelines. Spark is especially useful, and comparable distributed-systems experience counts.
• Solid SQL, plus a practical feel for partitioning, joins, columnar formats, and how data layout affects performance and cost.
• Experience integrating messy external data: APIs, bulk exports, file drops, changing schemas, rate limits, partial failures, and overlapping records.
• Care for data quality, provenance, and observability, and a plan for when things fail.
• User-facing features you've shipped end to end, not only the systems behind them.
• Product judgment. You connect infrastructure work to what researchers can do, and you'll work across layers to finish a feature.
• At least a year at an early or growth-stage company, somewhere small enough that you shaped the work rather than only executing a plan.
• Clear communication with engineers and non-engineers alike. You share proposals early, explain trade-offs plainly, and stay with a hard question.
• Pragmatic use of coding agents: noticeably faster because of them, with no drop in quality.

Responsibilities

• Own Elicit's scholarly search and data platform: its coverage, freshness, quality, reliability, and cost as the product and its sources change.
• Bring new kinds of evidence into Elicit and make them useful to LLM-based features, keeping structure, citations, and provenance intact.
• Build secure, rights-aware integrations for enterprise customers and content partners. Turn requirements around access, privacy, isolation, and auditability into product behaviour.
• Take features from a loose brief to production across frontend, backend, and data, with clear interfaces between the layers that you can change safely.
• Ship in small slices with staged rollouts, monitoring, and a way to roll back.
• Operate what you build, watch how people use it, and keep each new integration from adding more complexity than it's worth.
• Work on product features beyond integrations alongside the rest of engineering, and make the data platform easy for other engineers to build on.
• Use coding agents every day, review their output as carefully as you'd review a colleague's, and stay hands-on where the stakes are high.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

React

Data pipelines

Distributed systems

SQL

Observability

Communication

Coding agents

Product thinking

Tools

Spark

Job description

Elicit is hiring for a product-focused software engineer to own and evolve the scholarly search and data platform. You will improve distributed data pipelines, enable new evidence sources, and build enterprise-ready integrations with a focus on data quality, provenance, and observability.

The role spans frontend, backend, and data work, with a hands-on approach to coding agents and end-to-end features, and a flexible hybrid/remote setup from the Oakland area.