Director/ Senior Director, Lab Platform Engineering
About The Position
Lila Sciences is hiring a Director of Lab Platform Engineering to lead the team building and operating the hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure behind its automated labs. The role owns platform strategy for distributed lab sites and leads the engineers responsible for bringing new sites online reliably and repeatably. Lab Platform Engineering builds and supports the platforms and software that keep Lila's AI Science Factory running. These include bare metal clusters, cloud infrastructure, secure identity and secrets services, resilient storage, and APIs and tooling that enable scientists and engineers to ship software to production. The role will grow a newly forming organization to 10 to 15 engineers, establish multi-year technical direction, and partner with robotics, lab operations, research, and security leaders on future platform needs. The position owns platform roadmap and delivery, fleet operations and reliability, infrastructure budget and capacity planning, and vendor relationships. It also raises engineering standards and communicates platform strategy and tradeoffs to executives.
Requirements
- 15+ years in software or infrastructure engineering, with 8+ years leading teams, including managing managers or tech leads, or equivalent practical experience.
- Track record building and scaling a platform or infrastructure organization from a small team upward.
- Deep technical grounding in hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes operated at scale outside the public cloud.
- Experience operating production fleets against explicit reliability targets, with ownership of on-call and incident practice.
- Ownership of infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor negotiation.
- Proven cross-functional and executive partnership, including communicating technical tradeoffs to non-engineering leaders.
- Demonstrated ability to hire and develop senior and principal-level engineers.
Nice To Haves
- Experience in laboratory automation, robotics, hardware-adjacent platforms, or lab software for life sciences or materials science.
- Experience with distributed and edge systems, including multi-site operations, intermittently connected environments, or over-the-air software rollout.
- Experience with identity and secrets management across hybrid environments or operating in regulated or audited settings.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, developer experience as a product, or AI-assisted engineering workflows adopted across a team.
- Experience standing up a new function, integrating acquired or transferred teams, or managing a team split across offices and remote.
Responsibilities
- Build and lead a team of 10 to 15 engineers, including managers and tech leads; hire, develop, and retain engineers at every level.
- Set multi-year technical vision and strategy for hybrid edge and cloud infrastructure across distributed lab sites.
- Own the platform roadmap and delivery, shipping predictably against commitments made to partner teams.
- Own fleet operations and reliability, including service levels, on-call, and incident response across sites.
- Own infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor relationships.
- Partner with robotics, lab operations, research, and security, and communicate platform strategy and tradeoffs to executives.
- Raise the engineering bar through standards, review practices, and technical thought leadership.
Benefits
- Competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity.
- For full-time U.S. employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer-paid life and disability insurance; flexible time off with generous company-wide holidays; paid parental leave; educational assistance; commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office-based employees; and a company-subsidized lunch program.
- For full-time employees outside the U.S.: a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
