Lila Sciences at a glance
Lila Sciences
Your Impact at LILA
Join us in shaping the future of science! We are seeking Principal Software Engineers with backend experience to join our Data Platform Team (Data), where you’ll collaborate with software engineers, lab scientists, and machine learning engineers to build cutting-edge tools for automated scientific analysis and more. If you thrive in a collaborative, fast-paced environment and bring best practices in git, development workflows, and user-centered design, we want to hear from you!
About The Team
The Data Platform Team (Data) builds and support the data systems that underpins Lila’s AI Science Factory™. Every experiment run in our labs, every measurement from an instrument, and every signal from our operational systems flows through the platform they build. Their work spans real-time ingestion, large-scale analytical storage, workflow orchestration, and the self-service tools scientists, engineers, and ML teams use to go from raw measurements to discoveries. They build the data backbone of Scientific Superintelligence™, so the science moves faster and each experiment makes the next one smarter.
What You’ll Be Building
- Design & Build APIs: Design and build high-performance, secure, and well-documented APIs that integrate with AI-driven applications.
- Database Architecture & Scaling: Develop schemas and manage diverse data systems (SQL, NoSQL, Vector DBs, and others) for optimal performance and scalability.
- Performance & Reliability: Diagnose and optimize system bottlenecks, ensuring high availability and low-latency performance across large-scale workloads.
- Cloud & Infrastructure: Leverage AWS services, Kubernetes and modern DevOps practices to build and deploy production-grade systems at scale.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with ML researchers, engineers, and scientists to integrate data pipelines, APIs, and cloud infrastructure into scientific workflows.
What You’ll Need To Succeed
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- 8-15 years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale systems in production. You must be strong in scalable backend system design.
- Full Stack Development: Experience developing web apps across the full stack (React, TypeScript, Monorepos like Nx, TailWind, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, Python, Pydantic)
- Experience with ORMs: Experience with and web services for CRUD services (SQL Alchemy, SQLModel, FastAPI, Django).
- Orchestration Systems: Experience with orchestrators tools (Airflow, Prefect, Temporal, Dagster).
- Familiarity with Python for Science: Familiarity with data science and ML libraries (pandas, numpy, scipy, jax, pytorch).
- Hands on experience using AI coding assistants to drive productivity is required.
- Communication & Collaboration: Acute listening and writing skills, and a proven track record of working cross-functionally with scientists, data engineers, and product teams; able to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences.
- Problem Solving: Proven ability to design complex backend solutions, balancing trade-offs between scalability, performance, and maintainability.
Bonus Points For
- Cloud & DevOps Knowledge: Hands-on experience with AWS; strong understanding of Kubernetes and containerization, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions).
- Domain Background: Exposure to laboratory software or analytics for life sciences, material sciences, or related fields.
- Experience with laboratory devices, robotics, or hardware
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.
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.
To apply for this job please visit job-boards.greenhouse.io.
Explore Lila Sciences online
What people say about Lila Sciences
- High-Entropy Alloy
- Hellenistic War-Elephants and the Use of Alcohol Before Battle
- Statement on AI Risk
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Recent news
- From Materials Simulation to Experimental Astronomy, New NVIDIA AI Software Unlocks Scientific Discoveries - NVIDIA Blog
- 25. Lila Sciences - CNBC
- Lila Sciences Said in Talks for Funds at $8.5 Billion Valuation - Bloomberg.com
- Lila Sciences in talks for $2B funding at $8.5B valuation - Bloomberg - Investing.com
- Lila Sciences eyes $8.5b valuation, Suno's $5.4b, and Aeon's sport ambitions shrink - Axios
Aggregated from public discussions and news; opinions are the authors’ own.
Working in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
Cambridge is a city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, 55 miles (89 km) north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of the City of Cambridge was 145,700; the population of the wider built-up area was 181,137. There is archaeological evidence of settlement in the area dating back to as early as the Bronze Age, and Cambridge became an important trading centre during the Roman and Viking eras. The first town charters were granted in the 12th century, although mod
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. England shares a land border with Scotland to the north and another land border with Wales to the west, and is surrounded by the North Sea to the east, the English Channel to the south, the Celtic Sea to the south-west, and
Source: Wikipedia (state)
Market context
- Similar listings in Cambridge, MA USA; San Francisco, CA USA 1
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