Principal Engineer, Enterprise Search & Knowledge Graph

Lila Sciences, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 224,000 - 336,000; Full time

Job summary

Lila Sciences, Inc. is hiring a Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval (Enterprise AI) in San Francisco, CA.

You will own the stack from ingestion to retrieval, building a unified platform for scientists to query literature, patents, documents, and experimental records with traceable, cited answers. We seek an experienced engineer to lead platform engineering, AI/ML, and data-infra across the retrieval stack, including graph retrieval, embeddings, and multi-modal data ingestion.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience in production systems.
• Experience delivering search/retrieval/knowledge-graph platforms used by real users.
• Strong Python coding and backend framework experience (FastAPI, async Python).
• Experience with embedding models, vector indexes (HNSW/IVF), and hybrid retrieval.
• Ability to measure retrieval quality and detect regressions.
• Cross-functional communication to influence architecture.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the shared retrieval foundation and platform architecture.
• Build a scientific knowledge graph and graph retrieval with vector and lexical fusion.
• Develop agentic search with traceable reasoning and end-to-end retrieval quality.
• Ingest and extract diverse scientific data (PDFs, patents, lab protocols) into searchable evidence.

Job description

Lila Sciences, Inc. is hiring a Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval (Enterprise AI) in San Francisco, CA.

You will own the stack from ingestion to retrieval, building a unified platform for scientists to query literature, patents, documents, and experimental records with traceable, cited answers. We seek an experienced engineer to lead platform engineering, AI/ML, and data-infra across the retrieval stack, including graph retrieval, embeddings, and multi-modal data ingestion.