Associate Director, App

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 12+ years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale production systems, with 5+ years leading senior engineers.
• Track record of building and growing high-performing engineering teams in high-growth or early-stage environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long-term architecture.
• Deep technical judgment on Applied AI (agents, MCP, context engineering) and across the full stack (React, TypeScript, Python, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, AWS, Kubernetes).
• Hands-on experience — personally and on the teams you've led — using AI coding assistants and agentic tooling to drive productivity.
• Proven ability to define technical strategy, drive it to execution, and balance trade-offs between scalability, performance, delivery speed, and maintainability.
• Acute listening skills and a proven track record of partnering cross-functionally with scientists, ML engineers, product, and design; able to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences.

• Applied AI Engineering leadership: Experience shipping products built on AI agents, graph-based workflows, tool-use protocols (MCP), RAG pipelines, or LLM orchestration frameworks.
• AI-native product intuition: A point of view on what "good" looks like for chat, agent, and copilot experiences — and how to evolve it as the underlying models improve.
• Cloud & DevOps depth: Familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and CI/CD (GitHub Actions).
• Thought leadership in the applied-AI community via conference talks, blog posts, or open source.
• Scientific domain exposure: Experience with laboratory software, analytics for life sciences or material sciences, or adjacent scientific computing domains.

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.

Lila Sciences is building Scientific SuperintelligenceTM 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 FactoryTM 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.

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.

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