Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval
About The Position
Lila Sciences is hiring a deeply technical senior individual contributor to own the enterprise search and retrieval platform that enables scientists and agents to query scientific knowledge, including published literature and patents, customer-supplied documents, lab protocols, and structured experimental records. The role owns the stack end to end, from ingestion through retrieval to cited answers that scientists can trace to their evidence. The platform must support enterprise requirements such as security, auditability, operational rigor, and tenancy enforced in indexes and graphs rather than only at the application layer. The engineer will define a shared retrieval foundation for scientific workloads across the company, build a scientific knowledge graph connecting literature with structured experimental records, and fuse graph retrieval with vector and lexical search. The role also encompasses agentic search and autonomous research loops, retrieval quality and evaluation, and pipelines that transform varied scientific data into semantically searchable evidence. It offers broad architectural influence, high autonomy, and cross-functional technical leadership in a fast-moving environment.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of software development experience.
- Production ownership of a search, retrieval, RAG, or knowledge graph system relied on by real users.
- Production experience with semantic search, including embedding models, vector indexes such as HNSW or IVF, hybrid lexical and vector retrieval, and reranking.
- Experience in high-growth environments where speed-to-value and long-term architecture both mattered.
- Ability to describe how retrieval quality was measured, including recall, groundedness, and citation accuracy, and how regressions were detected.
- Hands-on coding experience in Python and modern backend frameworks such as FastAPI and async Python.
- Experience with modern cloud-native architectures, including Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS.
- Strong cross-functional communication and ability to influence architecture across teams.
- BS, MS, Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Nice To Haves
- Graph database experience.
- Experience shipping RAG or semantic search in a regulated or enterprise context and navigating security and compliance review, including SOC 2, HIPAA, GxP (including ALCOA+ data integrity), or FedRAMP.
- Experience with permission-aware retrieval over access-controlled data.
- Experience with document understanding at scale, including OCR, layout-aware parsing, and table and figure extraction from scientific literature.
- Experience with agentic retrieval and GraphRAG patterns and their evaluation.
- Experience with scientific or laboratory data platforms such as LIMS, ELN, bioinformatics, or materials informatics, including provenance and traceability requirements.
- Experience with domain-specific corpora and scientific ontologies such as UMLS, MeSH, ChEBI, GO, UniProt, or Materials Project.
- Knowledge graph construction and graph retrieval experience with property graph or RDF stores.
Responsibilities
- Define the shared retrieval foundation and architecture for scientific workloads across the company.
- Build a scientific knowledge graph connecting literature to the structured experimental record.
- Own graph retrieval and its fusion with vector and lexical search to produce cited answers.
- Build agentic search, including query planning, retrieval, and traceable reasoning.
- Own the retrieval pipeline end to end and develop its evaluation harness.
- Build ingestion and extraction pipelines that turn scientific data, including PDFs, patents, and lab protocols, into semantically searchable evidence.
- Provide technical leadership across platform engineering, infrastructure, AI/ML, and scientific teams.
- Own critical platform systems with broad architectural influence and autonomy.
Benefits
- Competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity.
- For full-time U.S. employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- For full-time U.S. employees: employer-paid life and disability insurance.
- For full-time U.S. employees: flexible time off and generous company-wide holidays.
- For full-time U.S. employees: paid parental leave.
- For full-time U.S. employees: educational assistance program.
- For office-based U.S. employees: commuter benefits, including bike share memberships.
- For full-time U.S. employees: company-subsidized lunch program.
- International employees receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
