I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Elicit (Oakland, CA) in Nov 2025
Interview
The onsite team was generally friendly, but the overall interview experience raised several concerns. After the first set of interviews, the CEO came in and, without sharing any feedback from the earlier sessions, informed me that the process would not be moving forward and asked me to leave. The abruptness of this interaction felt unusual for an onsite.
Except for one session, most interviews appeared unstructured, and several interviewers mentioned they did not have prepared questions. This made it difficult to understand expectations for the role.
During lunch, there were comments made about non-Christian religions that felt inappropriate for a professional setting and created an uncomfortable environment. The CEO was present but did not redirect the conversation.
From what I observed, the product still seems early in its development, and the AI evaluation dataset referenced to me included only about twenty question-answer pairs, which felt limited for the scope of the work described.
Overall, based on this experience, I would strongly urge candidates to carefully evaluate whether this interview environment and level of organizational structure meet the standards they expect before deciding to proceed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Design an ML pipeline for ingesting documents with fault tolerance for external model API’s.
- Design an eval pipeline with a small set of question and answers.
- Debug a fastapi server code
- Review and critique infrastructure code base
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Elicit (Oakland, CA)
Interview
Meeting with founder, meeting with head of engineering, meeting with head of operations and a team lunch. It seemed improvised, but everyone was kind and respectful. Seems like an interesting company
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What kind of orgs have you supported and what are the key metrics you utilize to track efficiency.
They asked me to review their process and interviewer scorecards and how I would assess where they can improve