Maintenance Engineering Technician II

Lilasciences; Cambridge; On-site; GBP 42,000 - 56,000; Full time

Job summary

Lila Sciences is seeking a Maintenance Engineering Technician in Cambridge, UK to sustain instrument uptime in a fast-moving, highly automated lab environment. You will perform preventive maintenance, troubleshoot issues, calibrate systems, and coordinate with Lab Operations, Research Operations, and Hardware & Controls Engineering to keep workcells running.

This hands-on role emphasizes discipline in documentation and the ability to work across multiple instrument families, including biological

Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on instrument maintenance in a lab.
• Experience maintaining biological or analytical instruments.
• Calibrate pipetting systems; troubleshoot fluidics.
• Maintain cell culture equipment preventive maintenance.
• Familiarity with biosafety and containment protocols.
• Strong documentation discipline and CMMS familiarity.
• Independent troubleshooting and PM execution across instrument families.

Responsibilities

• Execute scheduled preventive maintenance across the instrument fleet.
• Maintain PM, repair, and service records in CMMS.
• Calibrate instruments and support IQ/OQ/PQ execution.
• Respond to alarms, failures, and performance anomalies.
• Perform in-scope repairs and escalate to higher engineering levels.
• Document incidents, repairs, and out-of-tolerance conditions in CMMS.
• Coordinate vendor visits and track service records.
• Maintain spare parts inventory.
• Track MTBF and downtime trends to identify failures.

Skills

Instrument maintenance

Biological/analytical instruments

CMMS documentation

Pipetting calibration

Fluidics troubleshooting

Optical systems

Cell culture equipment PM

Biosafety familiarity

Independent troubleshooting

Tools

Maximo

eMaint

MaintainX

Fiix

Job description

Your Impact at LILA

Maintenance Engineering Technicians are the backbone of instrument uptime at Lila. You will execute preventive maintenance schedules, perform first-response troubleshooting, maintain calibration and qualification records, and coordinate with Lab Operations, Research Operations, and Hardware & Controls Engineering to keep workcells running.

This is a hands-on, precision role in a fast-moving, highly automated lab environment. You’ll support reliable operation of commissioned instruments and integrated workcells through disciplined maintenance, documentation, troubleshooting, and vendor coordination.

What You'll Be Building

• Execute scheduled preventive maintenance across the commissioned instrument fleet.
• Maintain accurate PM, repair, and service records in the CMMS.
• Perform instrument calibration and support IQ/OQ/PQ execution.
• Respond to instrument alarms, failures, and performance anomalies during shift.
• Execute in-scope repairs and escalated engineering-level issues to HCE or Automation.
• Document incidents, repairs, and out-of-tolerance conditions in the CMMS.
• Coordinate vendor visits, track service records, and maintain spare parts inventory.
• Track MTBF and downtime trends to surface recurring failure patterns.
• Help develop ME SOPs, work instructions, and maintenance practices.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• 3+ years of hands-on instrument maintenance experience in a research, clinical, or production lab.
• Experience maintaining biological research or analytical instruments.
• Working knowledge of pipetting system calibration, fluidics troubleshooting, and optical systems.
• Experience with cell culture equipment preventive maintenance.
• Familiarity with biological safety and containment protocols.
• Strong documentation discipline and comfort working in a CMMS.
• Demonstrated independence troubleshooting and executing PM across multiple instrument families.

Bonus Points For

• Direct CMMS experience, such as Maximo, eMaint, MaintainX, or Fiix.
• Experience authoring or executing IQ/OQ/PQ in a regulated lab environment.
• Vendor management experience, including service contract coordination.
• Exposure to robotic automation platforms or integrated workcells.
• Comfort with shift-based operations supporting 24/7 lab environments.

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.

We’re All In

Lila Sciences iscommitted to equal employment opportunityregardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

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