Principal Engineer, Software (Enterprise Platform)

Lila Sciences•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Lila Sciences is building the infrastructure for autonomous science — AI systems that design experiments, run them in physical labs, and close the loop across life sciences, chemistry, and materials science. Our platform enables this to operate reliably at scale for external customers who require security, auditability, and operational rigor. We’re hiring a Principal Engineer, Enterprise Platform to build the foundational systems that make Lila ready for the world’s largest pharmaceutical and research organizations. Today we have the beginnings of multi-tenancy, identity and granular permissions and scopes, audit infrastructure, usage and billing. Enterprise customers require significantly more. You will drive core enterprise capabilities to production: multi-tenancy and tenant isolation, enterprise identity and permissions to support the full lifecycle of the Lila Platform, metering and billing infrastructure, audit logging, etc. You will push the frontier — building agentic AI-powered systems for self-service tenant management, intelligent customer observability, automated compliance workflows, Lila SDK, MCP, and AI-native external APIs that let customers and third-party agents interact programmatically with Lila's platform. This is a deeply technical senior individual contributor role focused on defining and building correct, secure, and scalable platform infrastructure. This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role. We move fast, ship weekly, and expect engineers who thrive in ambiguity not ones who wait for requirements to be handed to them. You will own outcomes. What You'll Be Building Enterprise infrastructure is foundational to making autonomous science deployable in the real world. The systems built in this role will determine how large organizations safely adopt, govern, and scale AI-driven scientific workflows across teams, data domains, and regulatory environments. You’ll help define the platform primitives that make that possible. Design and evolve the core identity systems powering Lila’s enterprise platform — organizations, groups, roles, SCIM provisioning, seat lifecycle management, and fine-grained authorization across experiments, datasets, models, and scientific workflows. You’ll define how tenant isolation, policy evaluation, and access governance work across the platform. Design tenant-aware schemas, metadata systems, and platform primitives that support highly heterogeneous scientific data across life sciences and materials science workloads. Drive architectural decisions around scalability, reliability, retention, and operational correctness. Architect systems for tenant provisioning, usage metering, billing, data migrations, compliance workflows, and operational automation. Push toward self-service and agentic operational workflows that reduce manual intervention while maintaining strong safety guarantees. Operate as a senior technical leader across platform engineering, infrastructure, security, AI/ML, and scientific application teams. This is a hands-on Principal Engineer role with broad architectural influence, high autonomy, and direct ownership of critical platform systems.

Requirements

12+ years of software development experience, with a focus on Enterprise SaaS product development
Deep expertise in enterprise SaaS platform systems: authentication/authorization (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML), multi-tenancy, RBAC, billing/metering, configurations, SDK and APIs
Experience with modern cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS/GCP) and event-driven systems, familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and containerized deployments
Track record building enterprise platforms in high-growth environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long-term architecture
Strong cross-functional communication skills and the ability to influence architecture across teams.
Hands-on coding in Python and modern backend frameworks (FastAPI, async Python)
BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field of study

Nice To Haves

Practical experience with agentic systems and workflow automation where models take actions with real operational consequences in regulated environments.
Worked on platforms serving scientific or laboratory data such as LIMS, ELN, bioinformatics, or related systems, and understand the provenance and traceability requirements associated with scientific workflows.
Built self-service enterprise tooling for non-technical administrators and have thought carefully about the UX and API design required to make those systems usable.
Experience with compliance frameworks: SOC 2, HIPAA, GxP, FedRAMP, or ALCOA+
Operated multi-tenant SaaS systems at significant scale with strict isolation, reliability, and compliance requirements.

Responsibilities

Design and evolve the core identity systems powering Lila’s enterprise platform — organizations, groups, roles, SCIM provisioning, seat lifecycle management, and fine-grained authorization across experiments, datasets, models, and scientific workflows.
Define how tenant isolation, policy evaluation, and access governance work across the platform.
Design tenant-aware schemas, metadata systems, and platform primitives that support highly heterogeneous scientific data across life sciences and materials science workloads.
Drive architectural decisions around scalability, reliability, retention, and operational correctness.
Architect systems for tenant provisioning, usage metering, billing, data migrations, compliance workflows, and operational automation.
Push toward self-service and agentic operational workflows that reduce manual intervention while maintaining strong safety guarantees.
Operate as a senior technical leader across platform engineering, infrastructure, security, AI/ML, and scientific application teams.