Associate Director / Director, AI Platform, Applied AI
About The Position
Lila Sciences is the world’s first scientific superintelligence platform and autonomous lab for life, chemistry, and materials science. We are pioneering a new age of boundless discovery by building the capabilities to apply AI to every aspect of the scientific method. We are introducing scientific superintelligence to solve humankind's greatest challenges, enabling scientists to bring forth solutions in human health, climate, and sustainability at a pace and scale never experienced before. Your Impact at Lila As the Director/Sr. Director of Applied AI you will be leading the build of our foundational Applied AI team that will fine-tune and adapt our models for real-world product use, make it safely accessible for diverse customer data, and deliver reliable interfaces (chat experiences and high-performance inference endpoints such as gRPC/HTTP/PCP servers). You will be reporting directly to the CTO and will own the roadmap from data to deployment, partner closely with Research, Product, Software, App, Safety, and Security teams, and ship models that are usable, measurable, and trustworthy.
Requirements
- 8+ years in applied ML/ML systems with 3+ years leading teams; track record shipping LLM systems to production
- Deep experience fine-tuning and evaluating large models for customer interaction
- Production inference expertise: serving frameworks (Triton, vLLM, TGI, Ray, Kubernetes), GPU orchestration, caching, and observability
- Data privacy and security best practices for multi-tenant systems
Nice To Haves
- Experience instruction fine tuning and hillclimbing therein.
- Experience building chat UX, guardrails, tool/function calling, and long-context strategies
- Knowledge of quantization/distillation, routing/mixture-of-experts, and cost optimization at scale
- Experience working in compliance-heavy environments (HIPAA, PCI, FedRAMP) and on-prem/VPC deployments
Responsibilities
- Build and lead a high-performing Applied AI team to deliver best-in-class scientific reasoning models for consumer applications
- Own an end-to-end model customization pipeline to create valuable models from Lila’s base models for high-value use cases including inference, chat, and Lila’s API
- Create an integrated evaluation framework for continuous model development and improvement
- Partner with cross-functional teams to define requirements, deliver customer POCs, and transition successful pilots into scalable products
- Set technical standards, documentation, and incident response for AI systems in production
- Recruit, mentor, and grow a diverse team
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
