--- title: 'Associate Director, App at Lila Sciences' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/associate-director-app-lila-sciences-cambridge-46qgd5hp866e' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-04' --- # Associate Director, App at Lila Sciences - **Company:** Lila Sciences - **Location:** Cambridge, MA / San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $204k–$306k - **Posted:** 2026-08-27 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/lilasciences/jobs/4371404009 ## Job description ## Your Impact at LILA Scientists shouldn't have to context-switch between a dozen tools to go from hypothesis to result. We're building the platform that makes this a reality — and we need engineering leaders who want to build the team that solves problems no one has solved before. We're hiring an Associate Director of Engineering, Application Team to lead the engineers designing the agents, interfaces, and platform integrations that let researchers seamlessly collaborate with AI. ## About The Team The Application Team sits at the center of LILA — the integration point where Machine Learning, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Software become one AI-native experience that carries a scientist from hypothesis to experiment to breakthrough results. - AI isn't a feature here — it's the architecture. Agent frameworks, tools, and LLM orchestration are core primitives, not bolt-ons. - The problems are genuinely hard. Connecting AI to automated lab workflows, ML pipelines, and multi-domain knowledge graphs means inventing patterns, not copying them. - You'll lead engineers who learn domains they never expected. Working shoulder-to-shoulder with lab scientists and ML engineers means your team's technical surface area grows fast. - Your team ships things that matter. The tools they build accelerate research timelines from months to days. If you want to lead at the intersection of AI and science, move fast, and grow the kind of team that can architect systems that don't exist yet — we want to talk. ## What You'll Be Building - Team Leadership: Build, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of 8-10 engineers spanning full-stack, agent, and platform expertise. Foster a culture of collaboration, ownership, and continuous improvement; conduct performance reviews, provide feedback, and identify opportunities for growth. Manage team workload, prioritize projects, and ensure timely delivery of high-quality solutions. - Technical Strategy & Execution: Define and execute the technical roadmap for LILA's application layer aligning with LILA's broader AI and product strategy. Drive innovation in how scientists interact with AI-driven systems. - Product Delivery: Own end-to-end delivery of the application platform — chat, agents, artifacts, and the integrations connecting them to lab workflows and ML pipelines — ensuring reliability, performance, and security across everything the team ships. - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with ML researchers, scientists, product managers, and other engineering leaders to understand scientific workflows and translate them into product capabilities. Communicate technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences; manage expectations and ensure alignment across teams. - Engineering Thought Leadership: Represent LILA's applied-AI work externally through conferences, presentations, and writing — helping attract top talent and establishing LILA's leadership at the intersection of AI and science. ## What You'll Need To Succeed - Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field. - 12+ years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale production systems, with 5+ years leading senior engineers. - Track record of building and growing high-performing engineering teams in high-growth or early-stage environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long-term architecture. - Deep technical judgment on Applied AI (agents, MCP, context engineering) and across the full stack (React, TypeScript, Python, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, AWS, Kubernetes). - Hands-on experience — personally and on the teams you've led — using AI coding assistants and agentic tooling to drive productivity. - Proven ability to define technical strategy, drive it to execution, and balance trade-offs between scalability, performance, delivery speed, and maintainability. - Acute listening skills and a proven track record of partnering cross-functionally with scientists, ML engineers, product, and design; able to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences. Bonus Points For - Applied AI Engineering leadership: Experience shipping products built on AI agents, graph-based workflows, tool-use protocols (MCP), RAG pipelines, or LLM orchestration frameworks. - AI-native product intuition: A point of view on what "good" looks like for chat, agent, and copilot experiences — and how to evolve it as the underlying models improve. - Cloud & DevOps depth: Familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and CI/CD (GitHub Actions). - Thought leadership in the applied-AI community via conference talks, blog posts, or open source. - Scientific domain exposure: Experience with laboratory software, analytics for life sciences or material sciences, or adjacent scientific computing domains. ## 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 $204,000—$306,000 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](https://www.lila.ai/candidate-privacy-policy-notice). 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. ## About Lila Sciences ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Lila Sciences is building the world’s first Scientific Superintelligence platform and autonomous lab, using AI to autonomously generate hypotheses, design and run experiments, and learn from results in real time across life sciences, chemistry, materials, energy, and defense. - **Entity Type**: Private (Privately Held) – Series A, Seed, and Grant funding rounds - **Headquarters**: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States - **Founded**: Not publicly available (first funding round was Seed in March 2025) - **Founders**: Not publicly available (founded within Flagship Pioneering’s ecosystem) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI-powered scientific discovery and autonomous laboratory platforms - **Target customers**: B2B – research organizations, biotech, pharmaceutical, energy, materials, aerospace, and defense companies - **Mission**: “Scientific Superintelligence to solve humankind’s greatest challenges” – accelerating discovery across medicine, materials, energy, and defense ## Products & Services - **LILA Platform (Scientific Superintelligence)**: An AI model and operating system that autonomously executes the entire scientific method – generating hypotheses, designing experiments, running them in physical labs, and learning from results in real time. - **AI Science Factory™ Instruments**: Proprietary hardware and robotics that serve as the “body” of the platform, enabling automated experimentation at scale. - **Domain-specific applications**: Tailored solutions for biotech (drug discovery, protein engineering), therapeutics (mRNA, antibodies, cell therapies), energy & environment (clean fuels, catalysis, critical minerals), advanced materials, chemicals, aerospace & defense, and oil & gas. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not disclosed - **Key Metric**: Total funding – USD $550.7M (as of LinkedIn data) - Seed Round (March 2025): $200M led by Flagship Pioneering - Series A (September 2025): $235M led by Braidwell and Collective Global Management - Series A (November 2025): $115M led by NVentures (NVIDIA) - Grant (January 2026): $671,400 led by ARIA - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Flagship Pioneering, NVIDIA (NVentures), Braidwell, Collective Global Management, ARIA - **Growth Signals**: Named #25 on the 2026 CNBC Disruptor 50 List; headcount of 308 employees (monthly growth +10.6%); 122 active job postings; operates in 6 countries (US, UK, Canada, Poland, Spain, Germany) ## Competitive Advantages - **Proprietary AI model** that consistently outperforms other models across scientific domains in complex analysis and reasoning. - **Autonomous physical labs** that close the loop between AI hypothesis generation and real-world experimentation. - **“Team of Teams” operating model** enabling startup speed at scale while maintaining radical transparency and high trust. - **General platform approach** (inspired by Rich Sutton’s “Bitter Lesson”) rather than narrow domain-specific tools, allowing broad applicability. ## Strategic Focus - Accelerating discovery across medicine, materials, energy, and defense - Scaling the autonomous science platform to more industries and use cases - Building “Scientific Superintelligence” that can tackle humanity’s greatest challenges - Continued investment in AI research, robotics, and lab automation ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Emphasizes velocity, trust, curiosity, truth, and grit. “Think freely, prove precisely.” A high-trust, mission-driven environment where scientists and engineers work side by side. - **Remote/Hybrid/Office**: Roles are listed in Cambridge, MA; San Francisco, CA; and London, UK. Physical lab presence suggests significant on-site work, but some roles may offer flexibility. Policy not explicitly stated. - **Notable perks/engineering culture**: Opportunity to work at the frontier of AI and scientific discovery; collaboration with world-renowned experts; access to cutting-edge robotics and AI infrastructure; strong emphasis on learning and teaching (“generous teachers and eager learners”). ## Sources 1. [lila.ai](https://www.lila.ai/) 2. [lila.ai/about](https://www.lila.ai/about) 3. [lila.ai/open-roles](https://www.lila.ai/open-roles) 4. [LinkedIn - Lila Sciences](https://www.linkedin.com/company/lila-sciences) 5. [Greenhouse Job Board](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/lilasciences/jobs/4246302009) ## Other roles at Lila Sciences - [Data Scientist II / Senior Data Scientist, Life Sciences](https://feeny.ai/job/data-scientist-ii-senior-data-scientist-life-sciences-lila-sciences-cambridge-wvrt5y3pkr50) — Cambridge, MA - [Senior Data Engineer, Bioinformatics, Cheminformatics, Materials](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-data-engineer-bioinformatics-cheminformatics-materials-lila-sciences-san-kp5d4nbn38vz) — San Francisco, CA - [Maintenance Engineering Technician II](https://feeny.ai/job/maintenance-engineering-technician-ii-lila-sciences-cambridge-qgp4st6zk9gw) — Cambridge, MA - [Research Scientist, Photonic Materials Discovery](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-photonic-materials-discovery-lila-sciences-cambridge-m87b6zgatgmg) — Cambridge, MA - [Research Scientist I/II, Computational Organic Electronics](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-i-ii-computational-organic-electronics-lila-sciences-mh2tq43ahp5d) — Cambridge, MA - [Associate Engineer/ Engineer I, Formulations and Characterization](https://feeny.ai/job/associate-engineer-engineer-i-formulations-and-characterization-lila-sciences-6dy4t3wbbqar) — Cambridge, MA - [Senior Manager, Scientific Discovery Capacity Planning](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-manager-scientific-discovery-capacity-planning-lila-sciences-cambridge-c1tjq0yzrj9f) — Cambridge, MA - [Finance Business Partner, AI & Software](https://feeny.ai/job/finance-business-partner-ai-software-lila-sciences-cambridge-dme1cxf7yazg) — Cambridge, MA - [Associate Director / Director, Strategic Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/associate-director-director-strategic-finance-lila-sciences-cambridge-fp5gxvaqvt2k) — Cambridge, MA - [Scientist II/Senior Melt Polymer Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/scientist-ii-senior-melt-polymer-scientist-lila-sciences-cambridge-jc2qn2patfg0) — Cambridge, MA