Director / Senior Director, Research Engineering, Life Sciences AI

Lila Sciences
San Francisco
Workplace: OnsiteFull timeUSD 320,000 - 490,000 annuallyFunction: Research & Scientific (R&D)Skills: ["Leadership","Mentorship","Strategic leadership","Architecting","Technical mentoring"]

Own and build the core Life Sciences AI (LSAI) computational platform that scientist-owned models plug into. You’ll architect and ship the foundational codebase, set engineering standards for quality, testing, versioning, and documentation, and make roadmap decisions that remove infrastructure bottlenecks while preserving reproducibility. As the team grows, you’ll lead and mentor engineers while remaining a primary hands-on contributor, leveraging end-to-end ML and MLOps expertise to take research into production.

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FursaFursa
Lila Sciences
Lila Sciences
6 days ago

Director / Senior Director, Research Engineering, Life Sciences AI

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Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 6 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Own and build the core Life Sciences AI (LSAI) computational platform that scientist-owned models plug into. You’ll architect and ship the foundational codebase, set engineering standards for quality, testing, versioning, and documentation, and make roadmap decisions that remove infrastructure bottlenecks while preserving reproducibility. As the team grows, you’ll lead and mentor engineers while remaining a primary hands-on contributor, leveraging end-to-end ML and MLOps expertise to take research into production.
Location: San Francisco
Workplace: Onsite
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Research & Scientific (R&D)
Seniority: Sr. Director level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Design, build, and own the foundation of the LSAI codebase that scientist-owned models plug into.
  • •Set and enforce engineering standards for code quality, testing, versioning, documentation, and repository structure.
  • •Make architectural decisions balancing rigor with a scientific-first contributor reality.
  • •Anticipate infrastructure bottlenecks and define the platform roadmap to enable rapid iteration and reproducibility.
  • •Build and manage an engineering team over time while remaining a primary hands-on contributor.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 320,000 - 490,000 annually
Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:Health InsuranceDentalVisionLife InsuranceParental Leave

Key Requirements

  • •Strong track record designing and building core software platforms or frameworks that scientists and engineers depend on.
  • •Deep platform architecture expertise with biological applications (protein design, nucleic-acid design, or cell foundation models) as a plus.
  • •Experience building infrastructure and tooling alongside scientists in a research environment while maintaining velocity.
  • •Full ML lifecycle expertise across data, training, evaluation, and MLOps, with a track record of taking research code to production.
  • •Experience mentoring people and setting technical practices across a team or organization.
Skills:LeadershipMentorshipStrategic leadershipArchitectingTechnical mentoring
Languages:English
Tech Stack:PyTorchCUDATriton

Company Brief

Lila Sciences
Develops AI-driven platforms to accelerate drug discovery and biological research by integrating machine learning with chemical and biological data to predict molecular properties, streamline candidate selection, and enable faster therapeutic development.
Industry: Biotech
Company Size: Small (11 to 50 employees)
Growth: Early Stage Startup
Funding: Seed
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