Frontier AI Lab Automation Lead

BioSpace; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 194,000 - 339,000; Full time

Job summary

Lilly, in partnership with NVIDIA, seeks an Automation AI Scientist to design agentic systems for planning, executing, and learning from physical experiments on-site in Silicon Valley. You will lead a small team of scientist‑engineers, own the automation platform end-to-end, and collaborate with chemists, biologists, and external partners to accelerate Design‑Make‑Test‑Analyze cycles.

The role requires a PhD or equivalent, 5+ years in AI or decision systems, and proven leadership; compensation

Qualifications

• PhD (or MS + 3 yrs / BS + 6 yrs) in Computer Science, Chemical Engineering, Robotics, Chemistry, Computational Biology, or a related discipline.
• 5+ years of applied experience building AI or algorithmic decision systems, including production LLM agent or multi-agent systems.
• At least one year of direct people management experience.

Responsibilities

• Design multi-agent systems with robust orchestration, state management, error recovery, and tool integration for laboratory workflows.
• Build the translation layer between high-level scientific intent and low-level instrument control across automation platforms (Hamilton, Tecan, Opentrons) and analytical instruments (LC/MS, NMR, HPLC).
• Implement active learning, Bayesian optimization, and reinforcement-learning approaches for autonomous experiment selection under real-world cost and throughput constraints.
• Instrument the loop end-to-end so every experiment produces model-ready data in ELN/LIMS and downstream training corpora.
• Partner with automation engineers and scientists to transition prototypes into reliable, monitored lab operations.
• Deploy and maintain containerized services using Docker and Kubernetes with GitOps and CI/CD practices.
• Lead and grow a small team of scientist-engineers: set technical direction, run design and code review, and ensure engineering quality.
• Own the agentic automation platform end to end: roadmap, architecture, reliability, adoption, and deprecation decisions and be accountable for outcomes.
• Translate scientific and business priorities into a sequenced technical plan, and communicate progress, trade-offs, and risk to senior R&D leadership.
• Work directly with NVIDIA researchers and engineers and partner teams across the AI@Lilly community.
• Evaluate external vendors, open-source projects, and academic collaborations for strategic fit.
• Autonomous agents reliably execute multi-step experiments on physical laboratory instruments without babysitting.
• Measurable reduction in DMTA turnaround attributable to autonomous planning and execution.
• The team you lead grows in capability and autonomy, with people you mentor taking ownership of major platform components.

Skills

AI systems

Agent-based systems

People management

Lab automation integration

Python / ML tooling

Education

PhD in CS/Engineering/Robotics

MS + 3 yrs / BS + 6 yrs equivalent experience

Tools

Hamilton automation

Tecan automation

Opentrons

Docker & Kubernetes

LC/MS / NMR / HPLC

Job description

Lilly, in partnership with NVIDIA, seeks an Automation AI Scientist to design agentic systems for planning, executing, and learning from physical experiments on-site in Silicon Valley. You will lead a small team of scientist‑engineers, own the automation platform end-to-end, and collaborate with chemists, biologists, and external partners to accelerate Design‑Make‑Test‑Analyze cycles.

The role requires a PhD or equivalent, 5+ years in AI or decision systems, and proven leadership; compensation