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Your Impact at LILA
Join us in shaping the future of science! We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer with full stack experience to join our software platform team, where you’ll collaborate with software engineers, lab scientists, and machine learning engineers to build cutting-edge tools for automated scientific analysis and more. This role spans web services and data engineering, with a strong emphasis on Python development for scientific applications. If you thrive in a collaborative, fast-paced environment and bring best practices in git, development workflows, and user-centered design, we want to hear from you!
What You'll Be Building
- Design & Build Services and Front-ends: Design and build high-performance, secure, and well-documented code that integrate with an ecosystem of existing services and apps.
- Performance & Reliability: Diagnose and optimize system bottlenecks, ensuring high availability and low-latency performance across large-scale workloads.
- Cloud & Infrastructure: Leverage AWS services, Kubernetes and modern DevOps practices to build and deploy production-grade systems at scale.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with ML researchers, engineers, and scientists to integrate data pipelines, APIs, and cloud infrastructure into scientific workflows and services.
What You’ll Need to Succeed
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- 4-8 years of experience writing software in a commercial setting.
- Full Stack Development: Experience developing web apps across the full stack (React, TypeScript, Monorepos like Nx, TailWind, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, Python, Pydantic)
- Cloud & DevOps Knowledge: Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure; strong understanding of Kubernetes and containerization, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions).
- Communication & Collaboration: Acute listening skills, and a proven track record of working cross-functionally with scientists, data engineers, and product teams; able to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences.
- Problem Solving: Proven ability to take ownership of complex backend challenges, balancing trade-offs between scalability, performance, and maintainability.
Bonus Points For
- Hands-On with Latest AI Tools: Exposure to AI technologies such as Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), or agentic frameworks, as well as experience leveraging AI to improve development performance.
- Experience with ORMs: Experience with and web services for CRUD services (SQLModel, FastAPI, Django).
- Orchestration Systems: Experience with orchestrators tools (Airflow, Prefect, Temporal, Dagster).
- Familiarity with Python for Science: Familiarity with data science and ML libraries (pandas, numpy, scipy, jax, pytorch).
- Domain Background: Exposure to laboratory software or analytics for life sciences, material sciences, or related fields.
- Experience with laboratory devices, robotics, or hardware drivers.
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.
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