Head Scientist: Agentic AI for Materials Science

Aimlroles; United States; On-site; USD 288,000 - 420,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Lila Sciences is seeking a lead for agentic AI to guide the roadmap and build autonomous materials experiments powered by agentic systems. You will drive architecture, oversee a small team of scientists and engineers, and coordinate with diverse teams to land scientific software in production programs.

You will balance ambitious research with production reliability, publish when merited, and shape how agentic capabilities scale across our materials portfolio.

Qualifications

• PhD in a relevant field and 5+ years of post-PhD research and applied ML experience.
• Track record of building and shipping agentic systems, ML pipelines, or autonomous research workflows with measurable impact.
• Deep expertise across modern ML, NLP, reasoning: LLMs, agentic frameworks, tool use, planning, data extraction, multi-modal data.
• Working knowledge of materials science, computational chemistry, or condensed-matter physics to ground agent behavior in real scientific constraints.
• Proficiency in Python and the ML software stack with strong reproducibility, testing, and production deployment.
• Experience leading scientists and engineers: setting technical direction, hiring, mentoring, and developing team members.
• Clear written and verbal communication; translating between research, engineering, and program stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the agentic AI roadmap for materials science, including agentic frameworks and retrieval-augmented generation for understanding multi-modal research data.
• Lead the design of agentic frameworks grounded in scientific understanding and state of the art; deliver end-to-end systems on real-world projects.
• Hire, mentor, and grow a small cross-functional team of scientists and engineers; set the bar for rigor, code quality, and reproducibility.
• Partner with diverse teams at Lila to push the state of the art and deliver systems that integrate with experimental infrastructure.
• Track state-of-the-art in agentic AI, translate advances into internal direction, and publish or present where merited.

Skills

Python

ML

NLP

Reasoning

Team leadership

Communication

Education

PhD in CS/ML/Materials/Chemistry/Physics

Tools

Python

ML frameworks

Job description

Lila Sciences is seeking a lead for agentic AI to guide the roadmap and build autonomous materials experiments powered by agentic systems. You will drive architecture, oversee a small team of scientists and engineers, and coordinate with diverse teams to land scientific software in production programs.

You will balance ambitious research with production reliability, publish when merited, and shape how agentic capabilities scale across our materials portfolio.