Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI
Lila SciencesCambridge, Massachusetts, United States · Posted 1 month agoDescription
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 Lila’s AI models for customer-specific scientific needs, with a focus on turning frontier model capabilities into reliable workflows that can be evaluated, iterated, and used in real customer contexts. This is a rare chance to join an early team with the autonomy, flexibility, and compute to tackle frontier science problems.
Applied AI sits at the intersection of AI Research, model engineering, and product deployment. The team partners closely with AI Researchers and Software teams to adapt Lila models to customer workflows, improve model quality through experimentation, and ensure model behavior works well end to end inside the application.
This role is ideal for someone who can bridge research and engineering: training or adapting models, building evaluation loops, debugging model behavior, and collaborating across AI and Software to move promising capabilities into production-quality systems.
What You'll Be Building
- Close the last-mile gap between Lila AI model capabilities and customer-specific scientific workflows.
- Build evaluation loops that measure model quality, reliability, and customer fit.
- Design experiments to improve model performance across applied customer use cases.
- Feed customer learnings, data signals, and evaluation results back into the Lila AI model improvement cycles.
- Partner with AI researchers to translate model improvements into usable capabilities.
- Work with Software to integrate model behavior into end-to-end product workflows.
- Debug model failures using traces, evaluations, customer context, and scientific feedback.
- Build reusable tooling for model adaptation, evaluation, and deployment workflows.
What You'll Need to Succeed
- Strong experience building, training, adapting, or evaluating machine learning models.
- Strong software engineering skills in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
- Experience with distributed ML training frameworks (Megatron-LM, TorchTitan, DeepSpeed, Ray)
- Experience designing experiments, evaluation metrics, or test sets for model performance.
- Ability to debug model behavior using data, traces, logs, and qualitative feedback.
- Experience working across research and engineering teams to move ML capabilities into usable systems.
- Familiarity with large language models, multi-modal models, or agentic AI systems.
- Clear communication skills for translating customer needs into technical model improvements.
Bonus Points For
- Experience adapting models for customer-facing or production workflows.
- Experience with scientific, technical, or data-intensive customer use cases.
- Experience building evaluation harnesses, model monitoring, or quality dashboards.
- Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, or agentic workflows.
- Experience with RL post-training, such as RLHF, GRPO, or tool-augmented RL.
- Experience training MoE architectures.
- Experience working with product or customer-facing teams to translate needs into ML improvements.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 326,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila is building a platform where AI and automation co-evolve to solve the hardest problems in medicine. Within Life Science AI (LSAI), Machine Learning engineers build and operate the systems that tu…
Est. 239,000 USD
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…
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. 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. 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. 210,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila is hiring a Senior Engineer II, Cloud Security to strengthen cloud and SaaS security across our infrastructure, platforms, and AI-enabled systems. This role owns hands-on security work across clo…
Est. 232,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is building the software platform that makes automated scientific discovery possible. At the heart of that platform is data: raw outputs from laboratory instruments, experimental model r…