Staff ML Engineer, Life Sciences AI

Lila Sciences • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

Lila is building a platform where AI and automation co-evolve to solve the hardest problems in medicine. Within Life Science AI (LSAI), software engineers build the systems that connect generative models, scientific data, and experimental workflows into reliable, production-grade pipelines powering Lila's protein design and engineering campaigns. We're hiring a Staff ML Engineer, Life Sciences AI to lead software infrastructure development for our protein design and engineering pipelines. This is a senior IC role focused on the engineering systems that surround and support our ML stack — pipeline orchestration, data flow between computational and experimental systems, integration of new tools and methods, and the developer experience that lets LSAI move fast on commercial partnership deliverables.

Requirements

• Master's degree or higher in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field (or Bachelor's with equivalent professional experience).
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience in Python (or comparable systems languages).
• Proven experience designing, building, and operating scalable production systems — APIs, data pipelines, orchestration, and cloud infrastructure.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, production-grade code, CI/CD, observability, and reliability practices.
• Experience building or operating scientific or ML-adjacent infrastructure — workflow orchestration, experiment tracking, and reproducible pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with containerization, orchestration platforms, and infrastructure-as-code on a major cloud provider.
• Track record of leading technical direction across multiple systems and partnering deeply with research scientists or ML engineers to translate scientific needs into production engineering.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building infrastructure for protein design and engineering, antibody engineering, or other molecular ML applications.
• Familiarity with biological data formats and bioinformatics tooling.
• Experience integrating ML training/inference systems with broader product or scientific platforms.
• Open-source contributions to scientific computing or data infrastructure projects.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build software infrastructure powering Lila's protein design and engineering pipelines: orchestration, data flow, APIs, and integration with experimental systems.
• Own the engineering side of LSAI's "Lab-in-the-Loop" lifecycle — connecting computational outputs to experimental inputs and feeding results back into design workflows.
• Onboard new tools and methods developed by AI scientists and ML engineers into production-ready systems used in commercial partnership campaigns.
• Partner cross-functionally with ML researchers, scientists, and platform engineers to translate research code into reliable, scalable systems.
• Set engineering standards for LSAI software — design reviews, CI/CD, testing, observability, reproducibility — and mentor senior engineers as the team grows.
• Diagnose and resolve reliability, performance, and scaling bottlenecks in production pipelines supporting partnership deliverables.

Benefits

• competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity
• 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
• a company subsidized lunch program

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior