Director/Senior Director, Molecular Discovery

Lila Sciences; San Francisco, Cambridge (CA, MA); On-site; USD 202,000 - 323,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Commuter benefits

Bike share and lunch program

Job summary

Lila Sciences seeks a Director/Senior Director of Molecular Discovery to lead autonomous, end-to-end small molecule discovery programs in a multi-site setting. You will ensure the discovery platform delivers validated candidates with high potency, selectivity, and favorable ADMET, guiding decisions from hit to lead and beyond.

You will work closely with AI/ML scientists, computational chemists, and platform engineers to optimize throughput, quality, and experimental efficiency, translating

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, chemical biology, or related field.
• 12+ years in small molecule drug discovery with 5+ years in a senior role advancing compounds.
• Experience delivering clinical candidates or close to progression decisions.
• Strong understanding of SAR, synthetic tractability, and lead optimization tradeoffs.
• Operational mindset with metrics, milestones, and accountability.

Responsibilities

• Own discovery programs end-to-end from hit identification to candidate nomination.
• Lead discovery output and set timelines, quality benchmarks, and throughput targets.
• Interface between autonomous platform and decision-making for potency and developability.
• Collaborate with AI/ML, robotics, and software teams to improve platform performance.
• Define assays, build capabilities, and manage scientific staff for execution.
• Coordinate CROs and external partners for specialized studies.
• Advise product teams on platform capabilities for partnerships.

Skills

AI/ML in molecular design

Leadership

Communication

Program management

Throughput optimization

Education

Ph.D. in medicinal/ computational chemistry

Tools

Robotics

Automated discovery platforms

Job description

Director/Senior Director, Molecular Discovery

Cambridge, MA USA; London, UK; San Francisco, CA USA

The Director, Molecular Discovery is responsible for ensuring our autonomous science platform reliably and repeatedly delivers validated small-molecule drug candidates against designated targets at increasing speed. The platform generates and tests hypotheses at superhuman scale, and you ensure that process translates into real, high-quality compounds that advance toward the clinic.

This role leans heavily into the AI and computational side of our workflow: you will be accountable for throughput, quality, and the operational health of the discovery engine, working hand-in-hand with AI scientists, computational chemists, and platform engineers to diagnose bottlenecks, close feedback loops, and continuously improve how the platform performs.

What You'll Be Building

• Own small molecule discovery programs against assigned targets, from hit identification through lead optimization and candidate nomination.
• Serve as the accountable leader for discovery output setting and hitting timelines, quality benchmarks, and throughput targets across active programs.
• Operate as the primary interface between the autonomous science platform and drug discovery decision-making, ensuring that what the platform produces meets the bar for potency, selectivity, ADMET properties, and developability.
• Collaborate daily with AI/ML, robotics, and software engineering teams to close the loop between computational predictions and experimental results, driving continuous improvement of the platform's predictive accuracy and experimental efficiency.
• Architect the components of each discovery program end to end, specifying the required assays, building or sourcing the right capabilities, and managing the scientific staff needed to execute. Define and enforce the quality standards, assay cascades, and decision criteria that govern how compounds progress through the pipeline.
• Facilitate relationships with CROs and external partners for specialized studies (e.g., in vivo pharmacology, safety pharmacology, DMPK) that sit outside the automated platform.
• Provide drug discovery expertise to Lila's product team for commercial partnerships, translating platform capabilities into credible value propositions for pharma and biotech collaborators.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, chemical biology, or a closely related discipline.
• 12+ years of experience in small molecule drug discovery from the computational, medicinal chemistry, or program leadership side with at least 5 years in a senior role closely involved in advancing compounds from hit-to-lead through candidate selection.
• Demonstrated involvement in programs that delivered clinical candidates, with enough proximity to compound progression decisions to own them whether from the computational, medicinal chemistry, or program leadership side.
• Deep fluency in medicinal chemistry principles, you may not have practiced bench medchem, but you understand SAR, synthetic tractability, and the multiparameter tradeoffs at the core of lead optimization (potency, selectivity, ADMET, PK, safety) well enough to guide them or define systematic decision frameworks for them.
• Operational mindset, experience running discovery programs with clear metrics, milestones, and accountability structures, and a comfort level with managing throughput and efficiency alongside scientific quality.
• Strong working knowledge of ADMET, DMPK, and the data packages required to advance a candidate to IND-enabling studies.
• Fluency with AI/ML-driven molecular design approaches (generative chemistry, molecular property prediction, free energy methods, active learning) and the practical judgment to know when computational output is actionable and when it needs experimental validation. You don’t need to build models, but you must be a credible, hands-on collaborator with the scientists who do.
• Effective communicator who can translate complex scientific and operational status into clear updates for leadership.

Bonus Points For

• Direct experience with automated, high-throughput, or closed-loop discovery environments (e.g., self-driving labs, robotic synthesis and screening platforms), you've seen what it takes to make these systems produce real drug discovery output, not just proof-of-concept demos.
• Experience applying computational chemistry or cheminformatics in a hands-on capacity, not just consuming model outputs, but contributing to how molecular design hypotheses are generated, scored, and prioritized.
• Experience building or scaling a discovery operation from early stage, standing up assay cascades, workflows, team structures, and vendor relationships without inheriting a mature infrastructure.
• Background across multiple therapeutic areas, giving you breadth in target biology and the flexibility to work across a diverse portfolio.
• Process-oriented thinking: you instinctively look for ways to measure, standardize, and improve how work gets done, without letting process become bureaucracy.

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

$202,400 - $323,400 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.

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