Associate Director/Director, Inference Engineering

Lila Sciences • Cambridge, MA

21h • $204,000 - $348,000

About The Position

Lila Sciences is hiring an Associate Director/Director, Inference Engineering to lead the team responsible for its model-serving platform, including inference APIs, serving frameworks, request routing, batching strategies, and deployment systems that bring models reliably into production. The role defines how Lila serves models at scale, balancing latency, throughput, quality, and cost, and serves as the technical authority connecting research and ML to production-grade serving capabilities. The work spans people leadership, service ownership, cross-functional partnership, and deep technical judgment in modern LLM serving.

Requirements

• Deep understanding of the inference stack for large language models, including serving frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and TGI, batching strategies, memory constraints, and latency/throughput tradeoffs.
• Experience owning a customer- or product-facing API service end to end, including SLAs, incident response, and service reliability in fast-moving environments.
• Track record of hiring, mentoring, and retaining senior technical talent and scaling engineering organizations through rapid growth.
• Strong technical judgment across latency, throughput, reliability, cost, and delivery speed.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical strategy and execute as priorities change.
• Ability to align ML, research, product engineering, and executive stakeholders with competing priorities.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience with speculative decoding, quantization (AWQ, GPTQ, FP8), or model parallelism strategies.
• Experience with serving evaluation, including output quality regression testing, A/B routing, and shadow deployments.
• Familiarity with GPU capacity planning, instance provisioning, utilization, and cloud cost modeling.
• Prior work in AI/ML startups or research-heavy organizations.

Responsibilities

• Own the inference service end to end, including API contracts, latency SLAs, throughput guarantees, and rate limits.
• Drive serving architecture decisions involving batching, KV cache, speculative decoding, quantization, and multi-node deployment.
• Establish SLOs for latency, throughput, and availability, as well as on-call and postmortem practices.
• Partner with ML, research, and product engineering to make new models production-ready.
• Build systems for model onboarding, deployment safety, evaluation gates, and observability.
• Build, mentor, and retain a high-performing engineering team, and own the serving roadmap.

Benefits

• Competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity.
• U.S. full-time employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Employer-paid life and disability insurance.
• Flexible time off with generous company-wide holidays.
• Paid parental leave.
• Educational assistance program.
• Commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office-based employees.
• Company-subsidized lunch program.
• International employees receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed