Head of Design

<h2>About Elicit</h2><p>Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help researchers figure out what's true and make better decisions. We're a Public Benefit Company with an office in Oakland and team members spread across North America and Europe. What connects us together is our mission is to scale up good reasoning for scientists and beyond. Elicit helps expert researchers push the frontier of what's possible in fields like biomedicine, health economics, and computer science.</p><h2>Why we're hiring for this role</h2><p>Since launching the newest version of Elicit last fall, the response has been overwhelming. We hit $1 million in ARR 4 months after introducing Elicit Plus, our subscription plan for users conducting literature reviews, and regularly serve a few hundred thousand MAUs through word of mouth alone.</p><p>This is incredibly energizing for our team. We want to take a design-led approach to how we are building Elicit as we work to rapidly innovate and ship more useful functionality to our core paying users even faster.</p><h2>We want Design to have a clear seat at the leadership table as our product and team evolves.</h2><p>We need a strong Head of Design who will map our design vision and goals to our broader business priorities, and who will eventually build out the exact product design team we need to continue to push our product and craft forward.</p><h3>You'll fully own</h3><ul><li><strong>Solving Elicit's toughest Product Design challenges.</strong> You'll be a hands-on Head of Design, executing on your vision for Elicit's info architecture. You'll think through and design solutions to help our users achieve their most critical goals. You'll work with Product and Engineering teams to drive projects end-to-end, from wireframes and prototypes through implementation. Read <a href='Living documents as a UX pattern in AI'>Living documents as a UX pattern in AI</a> for a taste of the design challenges in our domain.</li><li><strong>Defining Elicit's design philosophy and decisions.</strong> You'll hold the vision for what the product will look like in 6 months and beyond. You're fully responsible for guiding the company's design strategy and our approach to difficult trade-offs about when to go deep vs. broad and what the right primitives are to scale our interface.</li><li><strong>The success of Elicit's designers.</strong> Over time, you'll build the team we need for Product Design and other design functions. You'll define what success looks like for your team and will support hiring, recruiting, and cultivating the environment where designers can thrive.</li></ul><h3>You'll also support</h3><ul><li><strong>Representing Product Design at the leadership table.</strong> You will advocate for Design at Elicit and bring your point of view and influence into broader business decisions. You'll combine your ability to advocate for design with your deep understanding of our product, business, users, and culture to help us achieve our business goals and fulfill our overarching mission.</li><li><strong>The overall success of Elicit.</strong> You'll build strong relationships with other company leaders to push forward growth and progress at Elicit. You'll help build and execute both the product and the business roadmap, define success metrics for teams across the company, and ensure we're continually staying focused on the right goals.</li></ul><h3>You'll thrive in this role at Elicit if</h3><ul><li>You're excited to launch a new feature every week. We take lots of bets, avoid analysis paralysis, and value rapidly improving Elicit. You've got great instincts for when to be detail-obsessed vs. when a faster feedback loop will lead us to the best outcome, and are comfortable keeping multiple work streams moving forward at once.</li><li>You care about research and good reasoning in the world.</li><li>You break down complex design problems to first principles. We care most about designing for what our user want to do most and solving their most critical problems.</li></ul><h3>Requirements</h3><ul><li>You have previous experience leading Design for a start-up or in a similarly structured high-velocity team environment as a part of a cross-functional leadership team.</li><li>You have experience developing strategies to guide the decisions and behaviors of product and design teams and creating alignment across multiple stakeholders.</li><li>You can drive design team processes and have a history of elevating the work of other designers and bringing up quality standards for a product's overall user experience. (We'd love to hear about specific metrics and outcomes you have been responsible for!)</li><li>You have high standards for craftsmanship. This is a hands-on role where you'll also be contributing individually. You bring a strong track record of producing thoughtful, impactful work solving challenges in a highly complex and interactive problem space. We'd be especially interested in hearing about your experience designing technical products and complex web apps.</li></ul><p>There are many paths that can lead to a role like this. We're open to hearing from experienced candidates who have many relevant skills, even if they were acquired in ways other than what's outlined above. We encourage all serious interested candidates to apply.</p><h3>Salary and benefits</h3><p>In addition to working on important problems as part of a happy, productive, and positive team, we also offer great benefits (with some variation based on work location):</p><ul><li>Flexible work environment. You can work from our office in Oakland or remotely with heavy time zone overlap (between GMT and GMT-8).</li><li>Regular in-person retreats and coworking events.</li><li>Fully covered health, dental, vision, and life insurance for you + generous coverage for the rest of your family.</li><li>Flexible vacation policy with a minimum recommendation of 20 days per year.</li><li>401(k) with a 6% employer match.</li><li>$2,000 device budget to start, with more accumulating to keep your tools up to date.</li><li>Budgets for personal and professional development.</li><li>A team administrative assistant to help you with personal and work tasks, so you can focus on your core job.</li></ul><p>For all roles at Elicit, we use a data-backed compensation framework to keep salaries market-competitive, equitable, and simple to understand.</p><p>For this role, we're targeting a range of <strong>$180K-230K</strong>, depending on your level and competencies you'd bring to the role.</p><p>We offer above-market equity for all roles at Elicit, as well as employee-friendly equity terms (10-year exercise periods).</p>