Associate Director/Director, Inference Engineering

Lila Sciences, Inc.; Cambridge, San Francisco (MA, CA); On-site; USD 204,000 - 348,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Life and disability insurance

Generous holidays

Parental leave

Educational assistance

Commuter benefits (bike share)

Job summary

Lila Sciences, Inc. in Cambridge, MA is seeking an Associate Director/Director of Inference Engineering to lead the model serving platform, including inference APIs, serving frameworks, routing, batching, and deployment systems that bring models to production.

You will define scalable serving strategies, balance latency, throughput, quality, and cost, and act as the technical authority linking research and production. This role combines people leadership with hands-on architectural judgment.

Qualifications

• Expertise in inference stacks for large language models.
• Experience owning an API service with SLAs and reliability.
• Proven hiring, mentoring, and scaling engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the inference service end to end: API contracts, latency SLAs, throughput guarantees, rate limits
• Establish SLOs for latency, throughput, and availability, plus on-call and postmortem practices
• Partner with ML, research, and product engineering to make new models production-ready
• Build systems for model onboarding, deployment safety, evaluation gates, and observability
• Build, mentor, and retain a high-performing engineering team, and own the serving roadmap

Skills

Inference systems

API service ownership

Latency/throughput optimization

Team leadership

Technical strategy

Cross-functional collaboration

Stakeholder alignment

Tools

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

TGI

Job description

Associate Director/Director, Inference Engineering

Cambridge, MA USA; San Francisco, CA USA

Lila is hiring an Associate Director/Director, Inference Engineering to lead the team responsible for Lila's model serving platform: the inference APIs, serving frameworks, request routing, batching strategies, and deployment systems that bring models reliably to production.

You will define how Lila serves models at scale, balancing latency, throughput, quality, and cost, and act as the technical authority connecting research and ML to production-grade serving capabilities. The work spans people leadership, service ownership, cross-functional partnership, and deep technical judgment in modern LLM serving.

What You'll Be Building

• Own the inference service end to end: API contracts, latency SLAs, throughput guarantees, rate limits
• Establish SLOs for latency, throughput, and availability, plus on-call and postmortem practices
• Partner with ML, research, and product engineering to make new models production-ready
• Build systems for model onboarding, deployment safety, evaluation gates, and observability
• Build, mentor, and retain a high-performing engineering team, and own the serving roadmap

What You'll Need to Succeed

• Deep understanding of the inference stack for large language models, including serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, TGI), batching strategies, memory constraints, and latency/throughput tradeoffs
• Experience owning a customer- or product-facing API service end to end, including SLAs, incident response, and service reliability in fast-moving environments
• Track record hiring, mentoring, and retaining senior technical talent, and scaling engineering organizations through rapid growth
• Strong technical judgment across latency, throughput, reliability, cost, and delivery speed
• Demonstrated ability to set technical strategy and execute as priorities change
• Ability to align ML, research, product engineering, and executive stakeholders with competing priorities

Bonus Points For

• Hands-on experience with speculative decoding, quantization (AWQ, GPTQ, FP8), or model parallelism strategies
• Experience with serving evaluation: output quality regression testing, A/B routing, and shadow deployments
• Familiarity with GPU capacity planning, instance provisioning, utilization, and cloud cost modeling
• Prior work in AI/ML startups or research-heavy organizations

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

$204,000 - $348,000 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. 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.

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.