Staff ML Engineer, Life Sciences AI

Lila Sciences • San Francisco, California, United States • 22h ago

Your Impact at LILA

Lila is building a platform where AI and automation co-evolve to solve the hardest problems in medicine. Within Life Science AI (LSAI), software engineers build the systems that connect generative models, scientific data, and experimental workflows into reliable, production-grade pipelines powering Lila's protein design and engineering campaigns.

We're hiring a Staff ML Engineer, Life Sciences AI to lead software infrastructure development for our protein design and engineering pipelines. This is a senior IC role focused on the engineering systems that surround and support our ML stack — pipeline orchestration, data flow between computational and experimental systems, integration of new tools and methods, and the developer experience that lets LSAI move fast on commercial partnership deliverables.

What You'll Be Building

Architect and build software infrastructure powering Lila's protein design and engineering pipelines: orchestration, data flow, APIs, and integration with experimental systems.
Own the engineering side of LSAI's "Lab-in-the-Loop" lifecycle — connecting computational outputs to experimental inputs and feeding results back into design workflows.
Onboard new tools and methods developed by AI scientists and ML engineers into production-ready systems used in commercial partnership campaigns.
Partner cross-functionally with ML researchers, scientists, and platform engineers to translate research code into reliable, scalable systems.
Set engineering standards for LSAI software — design reviews, CI/CD, testing, observability, reproducibility — and mentor senior engineers as the team grows.
Diagnose and resolve reliability, performance, and scaling bottlenecks in production pipelines supporting partnership deliverables.

What You’ll Need to Succeed

Master's degree or higher in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field (or Bachelor's with equivalent professional experience).
8+ years of professional software engineering experience in Python (or comparable systems languages).
Proven experience designing, building, and operating scalable production systems — APIs, data pipelines, orchestration, and cloud infrastructure.
Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, production-grade code, CI/CD, observability, and reliability practices.
Experience building or operating scientific or ML-adjacent infrastructure — workflow orchestration, experiment tracking, and reproducible pipelines.
Hands-on experience with containerization, orchestration platforms, and infrastructure-as-code on a major cloud provider.
Track record of leading technical direction across multiple systems and partnering deeply with research scientists or ML engineers to translate scientific needs into production engineering.

Bonus Points For

Experience building infrastructure for protein design and engineering, antibody engineering, or other molecular ML applications.
Familiarity with biological data formats and bioinformatics tooling.
Experience integrating ML training/inference systems with broader product or scientific platforms.
Open-source contributions to scientific computing or data infrastructure projects.

Compensation

We offer competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity. Your final offer will reflect your background, expertise, and expected impact.

U.S. Benefits. Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer-paid life and disability insurance; flexible time off with generous company wide holidays; paid parental leave; an educational assistance program; commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office based employees; and a company subsidized lunch program.

International Benefits. Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market.

Expected Base Salary Range

$162,800—$200,200 USD

About LILA

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. We believe science is the most inspiring frontier for AI. Rather than hard-coding expert knowledge into tools, LILA builds systems that can learn for themselves.

LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai.

Guided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.

We’re All In

Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.

A Note to Agencies

Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.