Description
Your Impact at LILA
The AI Research team is tackling one of the most exciting, open problems in AI: training LLMs to run long-horizon scientific discovery tasks. Our approach spans the full post-training stack - from SFT to asynchronous RL on agentic harnesses - teaching models to plan, use tools, and learn from experience in domains where the ground truth isn't a preference label, but a scientific result.
We're rapidly growing our Research Engineering org and seeking talented engineers and ML practitioners across levels to design, build, and optimize systems to push this frontier: scaling post-training, sharpening reasoning, and unlocking compute-intensive agentic-harness training. This is a rare chance to join an early team with the autonomy, flexibility, and compute to tackle frontier science problems.
We operate with high agency, and a bias toward execution. Below are several focus areas within the team. We ask that candidates select the stream that best matches their experience and excitement.
Work Streams
Stream A: GPU Optimization & Training Performance
Maximize hardware utilization across 100B+ parameter asynchronous RL training runs. Responsibilities include profiling, performance optimization, custom kernel development, communication-computation overlap, and long-context throughput improvements. You set and maintain the performance baseline.
Stream B: Stack & Infrastructure
Own the post-training infrastructure end-to-end — supervised fine-tuning, asynchronous RL with tool integration, and data pipelines. Build modular, reproducible workflows with single-command execution. Manage upstream framework upgrades and deliver composable pipelines spanning Data, SFT, and RL stages. You work tightly with Research Scientists to develop and productionize novel algorithms to run at scale.
Stream C: Model Experimentation
Bring deep, hands-on experience training large language models. Lead experimentation on reasoning model development, including mixture-of-experts stabilization, curriculum design, and synthetic reasoning trace generation. You have a bias toward experimental design and tracking, and know how to prioritize runs that yield promising outcomes.
Stream D: Evaluations & Benchmarks
Design and build best-in-class scientific agentic benchmarks and harnesses, along with the dashboards and leaderboards that inform every training decision. You have experience working with well known public benchmarks and have spent time building bespoke agentic benchmarks and harnesses.
Stream E: Agentic Capabilities & Frontier Research
Train models capable of planning, exploration, and tool use over extended horizons. Advance the state of the art in RL at scale with tool-calling, subgoal decomposition, and shared memory/skills across trials to expand the frontier of scientific agent capabilities.
What You'll Need to Succeed
- Strong software engineering skills in Python; C++/CUDA a plus
- Experience with distributed ML training frameworks (Megatron-LM, TorchTitan, DeepSpeed, Ray)
- Understanding of large-scale model training techniques for 100B+ models
- Experience with cloud or HPC environment
- Ability to communicate technical results to internal and external stakeholders
Bonus Points For
- Prior work with large scale scientific datasets or domain-specific modeling
- Contributions to open-source ML frameworks
- Experience with RL post-training (RLHF, GRPO, tool-augmented RL)
- Experience training MoE architectures
Location
San Francisco, CA or Cambridge, MA (Remote, Hybrid, and On-Site available depending on team needs).
Compensation
We offer competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity. Your final offer will reflect your background, expertise, and expected impact.
U.S. Benefits. Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including 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; and a company subsidized lunch program.
International Benefits. Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market.
About LILA
Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. We believe science is the most inspiring frontier for AI. Rather than hard-coding expert knowledge into tools, LILA builds systems that can learn for themselves.
LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai.
Guided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.
We’re All In
Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.
Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.
A Note to Agencies
Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.
Similar jobs
Est. 240,000 USD
Your impact at LILA We’re building a talent-dense, high-agency research team to develop the next generation of learning systems and reasoning algorithms for agentic LLMs. Our work sits at the intersection of large langua…
Est. 239,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are growing our Applied AI org and seeking talented Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineers with expertise in LLM training, evaluation, and production-oriented ML systems. You’ll work on improving…
Est. 194,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is the world’s first scientific superintelligence platform and autonomous lab for life, chemistry, and materials science. We are pioneering a new age of boundless discovery by building t…
Est. 207,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Applied AI group and help build the next generation of our AI-driven scientific platform. In this role, you will design and optimize the backend s…
Est. 192,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Scientists shouldn't have to context-switch between a dozen tools to go from hypothesis to result. We're building the platform that makes this a reality — and we need engineers who want to solve probl…
Est. 218,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are a cross-functional team (Software and Robotics) developing orchestration algorithms (instrument scheduling and robot routing) and lab simulation capabilities. We are building the muscles of the…
Est. 255,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Scientists shouldn't have to context-switch between a dozen tools to go from hypothesis to result. We're building the platform that makes this a reality — and we need engineering leaders who want to b…
Est. 216,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Scientific System of Record Team and help build the next-generation AI-driven scientific platform. You will focus on developing user interfaces, se…
Est. 259,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is seeking a Research Engineer, Scientific Computing and ML/Physics Infrastructure to help turn promising research tools into robust, scalable systems. This role bridges research and pro…
Est. 276,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Scientists shouldn't have to context-switch between a dozen tools to go from hypothesis to result. We're building the platform that makes this a reality — and we need engineers who want to solve probl…
Est. 192,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA You will build the back-end and data foundations of the systems that schedule work across our autonomous labs, model them as digital twins, and turn raw experimental output into trustworthy, queryable…
Est. 232,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA The Staff/Principal DevOps Engineer - AI Inference will drive the design, implementation, and optimization of infrastructure purpose-built for serving machine learning models at scale. This role bridg…
Est. 216,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Join us in shaping the future of science! We are seeking Senior Software Engineers with backend experience to join our Data Platform Team (Data), where you’ll collaborate with software engineers, lab…
Est. 192,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Join us in shaping the future of science! We are seeking Senior Software Engineers with full stack experience to join our Scientific System of Record Team (SSR), where you’ll collaborate with software…
Est. 240,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We’re hiring a Machine Learning Scientist to advance multi‑modal reasoning with vision‑language models (VLMs) on real-world scientific data including, but not limited to: figures and plots, microscopy…
Est. 177,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Join us in shaping the future of science! We are seeking Senior Software Engineers with backend experience to join our Lab Software Team (LaS), where you’ll collaborate with software engineers, lab sc…
Est. 276,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Join us in shaping the future of science! We are seeking Principal Software Engineers with backend experience to join our Data Platform Team (Data), where you’ll collaborate with software engineers, l…
Est. 232,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA The Staff/Principal DevOps Engineer will drive the design, implementation, and optimization of our infrastructure and delivery platforms. This role bridges platform engineering, site reliability, and…
Est. 276,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are seeking a Senior Principal or Principal Software Engineer, Scientific System of Record to join our Scientific System of Record Team and help define and build the next-generation AI-driven scien…
Est. 179,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We’re hiring a Senior Software Engineer to team with our Machine Learning Engineers and Researchers to build software that powers Lila’s ML workflows and research tooling. You will be on a team of sof…
Est. 345,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA As Lila scales its AI Science Factories globally, the VP of Engineering will create and sustain an engineering model for a unified, scalable platform for autonomous experimentation. This role will be…
Est. 405,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA LSAI (Life Sciences Artificial Intelligence) is building the computational platform that powers Lila's work in the life sciences. We are looking for a Research Engineer to own and build the core codeb…
Est. 224,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Join us in shaping the future of science! We are seeking Staff Software Engineers with backend experience to join our Lab Software Team (LaS), where you’ll collaborate with software engineers, lab sci…
Est. 150,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Join us in shaping the future of science! We are seeking a Software Engineer II with backend experience to join our Lab Software Team (LaS), where you’ll collaborate with software engineers, lab scien…
Est. 232,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila is building toward scientific superintelligence, which depends on a steady supply of high-quality, purpose-built AI data. We're looking for a Senior or Principal Technical Program Manager to join…
Est. 301,500 USD
Your Impact at LILA As a Principal Security Engineer focused on AI Security, you will define and drive the technical strategy for securing how AI is used across Lila's enterprise. You will operate as a senior individual…
Est. 173,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA This Machine Learning Engineer for the Physical Sciences team focuses on building and operating end-to-end, scalable machine learning workflows that solve a diversity scientific use cases in materials…
Est. 345,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila is seeking a highly motivated and experienced engineering leader to lead a team responsible for our Lila's product data platform. You will own the data platform and infrastructure end-to-end — ar…
Est. 257,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA You'll own two connected but distinct areas. First, you'll decide which new scientific domain capabilities the Lila model should gain and how to build them — the right mix of reinforcement-learning en…
Est. 240,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA As a ML Research Scientist - Multimodal Data Extraction, you will advance Lila’s vision of scientific superintelligence by developing foundation models that autonomously read, interpret, and structure…