Senior Materials Scientist, AI Safety & Risk

Lilasciences; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 200,000 - 287,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus potential

Job summary

Lila Sciences is building a talent-dense AI safety team to map dual-use risks in materials science while safeguarding scientific discovery across the stack. The role focuses on connecting deep materials expertise with risk assessment to mitigate threats arising from advances in materials research.

Your work will translate dual-use judgments into policy boundaries, evaluation priorities and practical safeguards, collaborating with threat modelers and engineers to ensure responsible innovation.

Qualifications

• PhD or comparable experience in materials science with strong structure–property–processing knowledge.
• Experience assessing dual-use risks with understanding of harmful applications (e.g., nuclear, radiological, weapons-related risks).
• Ability to identify specialists, evaluate evidence, and synthesize across science, engineering and policy.

Responsibilities

• Map misuse risks by linking material properties, processing and functional performance to harmful applications.
• Assess how feasibility, processing complexity and manufacturing requirements influence misuse plausibility.
• Differentiate established vs. plausible future capabilities and update assessments as evidence evolves across tools and models.
• Identify gaps in expertise and coordinate with the expert-program team to integrate findings.
• Translate dual-use judgments into policy boundaries, evaluation priorities and mitigation requirements.
• Collaborate with threat modelers, evaluation researchers and engineering teams to assess capabilities and safeguards.

Skills

Materials science expertise

Dual-use risk assessment

Scientific communication

Interdisciplinary collaboration

Education

PhD in materials science

Tools

Computational materials science

Automated synthesis & characterization

Job description

Lila Sciences is building a talent-dense AI safety team to map dual-use risks in materials science while safeguarding scientific discovery across the stack. The role focuses on connecting deep materials expertise with risk assessment to mitigate threats arising from advances in materials research.

Your work will translate dual-use judgments into policy boundaries, evaluation priorities and practical safeguards, collaborating with threat modelers and engineers to ensure responsible innovation.