Director, AI-Driven Application Engineering

Lila Sciences; Cambridge, San Francisco (MA, CA); On-site; USD 204,000 - 306,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus potential

Equity

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Lila Sciences in Cambridge, MA is seeking an Associate Director of Engineering for the Application Team to lead engineers who design the agents, interfaces, and platform integrations that let researchers seamlessly collaborate with AI.

You will build a team of 8-10 engineers across full-stack, agent, and platform specialties, set the technical roadmap, own end-to-end product delivery, and collaborate with ML researchers, scientists, and product leaders to translate workflows into capabilities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 12+ years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale production systems, with 5+ years leading senior engineers.
• Deep technical judgment on Applied AI (agents, MCP, context engineering) and across the full stack (React, TypeScript, Python, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, AWS, Kubernetes).
• Hands-on experience using AI coding assistants and agentic tooling to drive productivity.
• Proven ability to define technical strategy, drive it to execution, and balance trade-offs between scalability, performance, delivery speed, and maintainability.
• Acute listening skills and cross-functional collaboration with scientists, ML engineers, product, and design.

Responsibilities

• Build, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of 8-10 engineers spanning full-stack, agent, and platform expertise.
• Define and execute the technical roadmap for LILA's application layer aligning with broader AI and product strategy.
• Own end-to-end delivery of the application platform — chat, agents, artifacts, and the integrations to lab workflows and ML pipelines.
• Partner with ML researchers, scientists, product managers, and other engineering leaders to translate scientific workflows into product capabilities.
• Represent LILA's applied-AI work externally through conferences and writing.

Job description

Lila Sciences in Cambridge, MA is seeking an Associate Director of Engineering for the Application Team to lead engineers who design the agents, interfaces, and platform integrations that let researchers seamlessly collaborate with AI.

You will build a team of 8-10 engineers across full-stack, agent, and platform specialties, set the technical roadmap, own end-to-end product delivery, and collaborate with ML researchers, scientists, and product leaders to translate workflows into capabilities.