Director / Senior Director, AI x Lab Integration

Lila Sciences; Cambridge, San Francisco (MA, CA); Hybrid; USD 360,000 - 570,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Life and disability insurance

Flexible time off with holidays

Paid parental leave

Commuter benefits

Lunch program

Job summary

Lila Sciences seeks a Director, AI x Lab Integration to grow and lead the AI x Lab Integration team within AI Research. You will set the research agenda for protocol understanding, generate executable experiments, diagnose failures, and adapt protocols as evidence arrives.

This hands-on leadership role involves recruiting exceptional researchers, making decisive technical calls, and partnering with scientists and data infrastructure teams to translate scientific objectives into reliable

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent leadership experience.
• Proven record of leading AI research translating into real capabilities.
• Experience building automated laboratory capabilities.
• Experience leading research teams and setting priorities under uncertainty.
• Ability to engage deeply with experimental scientists and translate objectives into research problems.

Responsibilities

• Set the research agenda for protocol understanding, intent-to-protocol generation, feasibility assessment, and adaptation based on results.
• Lead learning from demonstrations, corrections, and experimental feedback into model improvements.
• Oversee post-training methods for laboratory reasoning including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.
• Establish rigorous evaluation across protocols and cross-domain workflows.
• Hire, mentor, and lead scientists and research engineers with strong experimental standards.

Skills

AI research leadership

Team building

Experimentation

Model deployment

Education

PhD in ML/CS or related

Tools

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

Cambridge, MA USA; San Francisco, CA USA

Lila is building a platform where AI and automation co-evolve to accelerate scientific discovery. Within AI Research, the AI x Lab Integration team develops the capabilities that allow reasoning models to translate scientific intent into executable experiments.

We are seeking a Director, AI x Lab Integration to further grow and lead this team. You will set the research agenda for models that understand the purpose of a protocol, compose experiments against real laboratory constraints, diagnose failures, and adapt protocols as evidence arrives. Your work will help LLMs hone scientific judgment and learn from practical knowledge needed to turn a research question into a reliable experimental workflow.

This is a hands‑on research leadership role. You will recruit exceptional researchers, make consequential technical decisions, and establish rigorous evidence that model improvements transfer to real experiments. You will partner closely with domain scientists and the teams responsible for laboratory execution, data infrastructure, and orchestration.

What You'll Be Building

• The lab intelligence research agenda: Lead research across protocol understanding, intent-to-protocol generation, feasibility assessment, protocol repair, failure diagnosis, and adaptation based on experimental results.
• Learning from scientific expertise: Partner with the scientists to turn expert demonstrations, corrections, and experimental feedback into model improvements that capture tacit scientific knowledge.
• Post-training methods for laboratory reasoning: Lead research in supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, tool use, and learning from execution feedback. Determine which methods improve scientific validity, execution success, and generalization to unfamiliar protocols and conditions.
• Rigorous capability evaluation: Establish independent evaluations spanning individual protocol skills, decisions made during a run, and workflows that cross scientific domains. Measure scientific correctness, feasibility, execution outcomes, uncertainty, and the need for human intervention.
• A high-performing research team: Hire, mentor, and lead scientists and research engineers. Set clear ownership, maintain strong experimental standards, and build a culture of ambitious hypotheses, careful measurement, and rapid learning.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Robotics, Computational Science, or a related field, or equivalent research and leadership experience.
• A substantial track record of leading original AI research and translating it into capabilities that work beyond a benchmark.
• Demonstrated experience developing AI capabilities for automated laboratories, scientific agents, or closed-loop experimentation, with model decisions informed by real experimental results.
• Experience building and leading research teams, including recruiting strong scientists and engineers, developing technical leaders, and setting priorities under uncertainty.
• The ability to engage deeply with experimental scientists and translate scientific objectives, controls, and failure modes into tractable research problems.
• A hands‑on leadership style: comfortable reviewing model behavior, challenging research designs, interpreting failure cases, and guiding technical decisions.

Bonus Points For

• Deep technical expertise in foundation models, post‑training, reinforcement learning, agent learning, or closely related methods.
• Research in procedural reasoning, program synthesis, planning, causal reasoning, or uncertainty-aware decision‑making.
• Experience in methods for learning from expert demonstrations, sparse feedback, or costly real‑world experiments.
• Deep domain expertise in experimental biology, chemistry, materials science, or laboratory automation.
• A record of influential publications, open-source contributions, or deployed research systems in AI or AI for Science.
• Experience growing a small research team into a program with sustained scientific and operational impact.

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

$360,000 - $570,000 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.

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.