Staff Software Engineer, AI Safety

Lila Sciences • Cambridge, MA

1d • $192,000 - $272,000

About The Position

Lila Sciences is building a talent-dense, high-agency AI safety team that works across science, model training, lab integration, and other core teams to identify and mitigate risks from scientific superintelligence while preserving scientific discovery capabilities. The team’s initial focus is developing and implementing a safety strategy tailored to Lila’s goals and deployment strategies. Its work includes technical safety strategy, ecosystem engagement, safety evaluations, risk-mitigation systems, and research into longer-term needs such as oversight of superintelligent scientific systems.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the AI Safety team, you will build shared software that helps researchers understand and reduce societal risks from scientific AI. In partnership with researchers, domain scientists, and program colleagues, you will translate needs across threat modeling, evaluations, red teaming, and mitigation development into reliable tools and systems. You will own engineering work from scoping and prototyping through deployment and ongoing improvement, supporting research across scientific models, agents, and automated experimentation.

Requirements

• A track record of independently delivering and maintaining production software, including projects with ambiguous or changing requirements.
• Strong Python and backend engineering skills, including experience designing APIs, working with databases, and building dependable data or execution pipelines.
• Experience translating the needs of researchers, domain experts, or other technical users into usable tools, and comfort working across services and interfaces.
• Sound engineering judgment in system design, testing, and debugging, including practical decisions about reliability, performance, and complexity.
• Engineering experience in AI research, AI safety, scientific computing, or other settings with rapidly evolving experimental workflows.
• Clear communication and an interest in scientific AI safety, with the ability to understand research context and make informed engineering decisions.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building safety-specific tooling.
• Experience building full-stack internal applications, annotation or review tools, or systems for managing experimental evidence.
• Experience with distributed experiment execution, model-serving integrations, or isolated environments for agent evaluations.

Responsibilities

• Build reusable services, libraries, and model/tool integrations that make evaluations, red-teaming campaigns, and mitigation experiments repeatable.
• Develop applications that help researchers and scientific experts organize evidence, inspect results, review data, and investigate failures.
• Work with safety colleagues to understand research needs, identify shared engineering needs, prioritize useful improvements, and turn evolving research workflows into maintainable software.
• Build data pipelines and experiment records that preserve datasets, taxonomies, model versions, configurations, and results so findings are traceable and comparisons reproducible.
• Own the reliability and usability of shared safety tools through testing, debugging, monitoring, documentation, and continued improvement.
• Collaborate across LILA with core AI and software engineering teams to share tooling, align on infrastructure, and avoid duplication.

Benefits

• Competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity.
• 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.
• Paid parental leave.
• Educational assistance program.
• Commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office-based employees.
• Company-subsidized lunch program.
• Regionally tailored comprehensive benefits for full-time employees outside the U.S.

What This Job Offers

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