Director/ Senior Director, Applied AI

Location: Cambridge, MA USA; San Francisco, CA USA

Department: AI

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 the capabilities to apply AI to every aspect of the scientific method.  We are introducing scientific superintelligence to solve humankind's greatest challenges, enabling scientists to bring forth solutions in human health, climate, and sustainability at a pace and scale never experienced before.

Your Impact at Lila

As the Director/Sr. Director of Applied AI you will be leading the build of our foundational Applied AI team that will fine-tune and adapt our models for real-world product use, make it safely accessible for diverse customer data, and deliver reliable interfaces (chat experiences and high-performance inference endpoints such as gRPC/HTTP/PCP servers). You will be reporting directly to the CTO and will own the roadmap from data to deployment, partner closely with Research, Product, Software, App, Safety, and Security teams, and ship models that are usable, measurable, and trustworthy.

What You'll Be Building

• Build and lead a high-performing Applied AI team to deliver best-in-class scientific reasoning models for consumer applications
• Own an end-to-end model customization pipeline to create valuable models from Lila’s base models for high-value use cases including inference, chat, and Lila’s API
• Create an integrated evaluation framework for continuous model development and improvement
• Partner with cross-functional teams to define requirements, deliver customer POCs, and transition successful pilots into scalable products
• Set technical standards, documentation, and incident response for AI systems in production
• Recruit, mentor, and grow a diverse team

What You’ll Need to Succeed

• 8+ years in applied ML/ML systems with 3+ years leading teams; track record shipping LLM systems to production
• Deep experience fine-tuning and evaluating large models for customer interaction
• Production inference expertise: serving frameworks (Triton, vLLM, TGI, Ray, Kubernetes), GPU orchestration, caching, and observability
• Data privacy and security best practices for multi-tenant systems

Bonus Points For

• Experience instruction fine tuning and hillclimbing therein.
• Experience building chat UX, guardrails, tool/function calling, and long-context strategies
• Knowledge of quantization/distillation, routing/mixture-of-experts, and cost optimization at scale
• Experience working in compliance-heavy environments (HIPAA, PCI, FedRAMP) and on-prem/VPC deployments

About 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 the capabilities to apply AI to every aspect of the scientific method.  We are introducing scientific superintelligence to solve humankind's greatest challenges, enabling scientists to bring forth solutions in human health, climate, and sustainability at a pace and scale never experienced before. Learn more about this mission at  www.lila.ai

If this sounds like an environment you’d love to work in, even if you only have some of the experience listed below, 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.