Director/ Senior Director, Lab Platform Engineering

📋 Job Overview

Lila is hiring a Director of Lab Platform Engineering to lead the team that builds and operates the hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure behind our automated labs. You will own the platform strategy for a fleet of distributed lab sites and lead the engineers who make new sites come online reliably and repeatably.

🏢 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.

🎯 The Role

This is a leadership role on a team being built now. You will grow the organization to 10 to 15 engineers, set multi-year technical direction, and partner with robotics, lab operations, research, and security leaders on what the platform needs to support next.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Build and lead a team of 10 to 15 engineers, including managers and tech leads. Hire, develop, and retain engineers at every level.
• Set multi-year technical vision and strategy for hybrid edge and cloud infrastructure across distributed lab sites.
• Own platform roadmap and delivery, shipping on a predictable cadence against commitments made to partner teams.
• Own fleet operations and reliability, including service levels, on-call, and incident response across sites.
• Own infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor relationships.
• Partner cross-functionally with robotics, lab operations, research, and security, and communicate platform strategy and tradeoffs to executives.
• Raise the engineering bar through standards, review practices, and technical thought leadership.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 15+ years in software or infrastructure engineering, with 8+ years leading teams, including managing managers or tech leads, or equivalent practical experience.
• Track record building and scaling a platform or infrastructure organization from a small team upward.
• Deep technical grounding in hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes operated at scale outside the public cloud.
• Experience operating production fleets against explicit reliability targets, with ownership of on-call and incident practice.
• Ownership of infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor negotiation.
• Proven cross-functional and executive partnership, including communicating technical tradeoffs to non-engineering leaders.
• Demonstrated ability to hire and develop senior and principal-level engineers.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Scientific domain: laboratory automation, robotics, or hardware-adjacent platforms; lab software for life sciences or materials science.
• Distributed and edge systems: multi-site operations, intermittently connected environments, over-the-air software rollout.
• Security and compliance: identity and secrets management across hybrid environments, operating in regulated or audited settings.
• Platform practice: infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, developer experience as a product, AI-assisted engineering workflows adopted across a team.
• Organizational: standing up a new function, integrating acquired or transferred teams, managing a team split across offices and remote.

🎁 Benefits

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.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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.