Senior / Principal Chemist, AI Safety

Lilasciences; Greater London; On-site; GBP 111,000 - 156,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits

Commuter benefits

Educational assistance

Lunch program

Job summary

Lila Sciences is building a scientific safety team to identify and mitigate risks from AI-enabled science while preserving discovery capabilities. The role focuses on mapping misuse risks, evaluating feasibility, and translating risk judgments into safe, policy-aligned boundaries.

Ideal candidates hold a PhD or equivalent in chemistry with experience in dual-use risk assessment and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Qualifications

• PhD (or equivalent) in synthetic chemistry or related field.
• Experience assessing chemical dual-use risks.
• Strong scientific judgment about feasibility and constraints.
• Ability to identify specialists and combine findings across disciplines.
• Clear scientific communication and collaborative skills.

Responsibilities

• Map chemical misuse risks across models and experiments.
• Assess how feasibility, complexity and expertise affect misuse.
• Distinguish capabilities, plausible future developments and weak hypotheses.
• Identify gaps and frame questions for consultants and specialists.
• Translate risk judgments into mitigation requirements.
• Partner with threat modelers and mitigation teams.

Skills

PhD in chemistry

Synthetic chemistry

Chemical risk assessment

Scientific judgment

Interdisciplinary collaboration

Scientific communication

Education

PhD in chemistry

Job description

Your Impact at LILA

We're building a talent-dense, high-agency AI safety team at Lila that will engage all core teams within the organization (science, model training, lab integration, etc.), to identify and mitigate risks from scientific superintelligence while retaining the core scientific discovery capabilities of the stack. The initial focus of this team will be to build and implement a bespoke safety strategy for Lila, tailored to its specific goals and deployment strategies. This will involve technical safety strategy development, broader ecosystem engagement, safety-focused evaluations, safety systems to mitigate risks, and a research agenda that explores longer-term needs such as oversight of superintelligent scientific systems.

What You'll Be Building

• Map chemical misuse risks across scientific models, agents and automated experimentation, connecting scientific advances to harmful applications and identifying emerging or overlooked pathways.
• Assess how scientific feasibility, practical complexity and actors' expertise or resources affect the plausibility and likelihood of misuse, including which constraints AI could change.
• Distinguish established capabilities, plausible future developments and weakly supported hypotheses, updating assessments as scientific evidence and AI capabilities evolve.
• Identify gaps in coverage, frame questions for consultants and specialist organizations, and assess and integrate their findings with support from the expert-program team.
• Translate scientific risk judgments into dual-use policy boundaries, evaluation priorities and mitigation requirements that preserve beneficial chemistry.
• Partner with threat modelers, evaluation researchers and mitigation teams to design informative assessments, interpret red-team findings and test safeguards.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• Deep expertise (a PhD, or comparable experience) in synthetic chemistry or a closely related discipline, demonstrated through substantial research or applied work and sound interpretation of experimental evidence. This includes a background in molecular design and medicinal chemistry, inorganic and organometallic chemistry, synthesis, process development and formulations, or other relevant sub-fields.
• Substantive experience assessing chemical dual-use risks (e.g. across national security, export controls, or other chemical risk tracking such as the CWC).
• Strong scientific judgment about feasibility, uncertainty and practical constraints, including the ability to investigate unfamiliar questions and recognize the limits of your expertise.
• The ability to identify appropriate specialists, critically assess their evidence and combine findings across disciplines into defensible risk assessments.
• Clear scientific communication, independent research judgment and an ability to collaborate across science, engineering and policy.

Bonus Points For

• Prior experience applying domain expertise to AI safety through one or more of: scientific analysis informing threat models; evaluation or red-teaming work; or mitigation design.
• Experience commissioning specialist research or coordinating external scientific collaborators.
• Experience with automated chemistry, scientific modeling or the translation of computational findings into physical experiments.

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.

Expected Base Salary Range

$148,000 – $208,000 USD

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.

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.