Senior / Principal Research Engineer, LLM Synthetic Data

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

Department: AI

Your Impact at Lila

As a Sr./Principal Research Engineer focused on Synthetic Data, you’ll contribute to the vision, roadmap, and delivery of our synthetic data program—from asset generation and simulation to ML training integration and measurable model gains. You will be working with the Research Engineering team in designing, generating, and implementing artificial datasets to train, test, and improve Lila’s platform and help us reach our goals.

What You'll Be Building

• Help to define the synthetic data strategy and multi-quarter roadmap
• Develop evaluation frameworks that tie synthetic interventions to real model performance
• Establish standards for asset quality, diversity, documentation, and reproducibility; contribute to a healthy review culture.

What You’ll Need to Succeed

• 6+ years in applied ML/ML systems with 3+ years leading industry initiatives; track record of advanced algorithms and frameworks designed specifically for generating large-scale synthetic data.
• 8+ years working with modern ML workflows: Python, PyTorch, dataset tooling, training loops, and evaluation frameworks; comfortable profiling and optimizing GPU-heavy pipelines.

Bonus Points For

• Track record of building synthetic data sets from source data to measurably augment model performance in targeted domains.
• Experience instruction fine tuning and hillclimbing therein.
• Building product requirements and feedback into sythentic data generation pipeline at scale
• 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.