Senior Director, Data Platform Engineering

Lilasciences; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 390,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible time off

Educational assistance

Commuter benefits

Lunch program

Healthcare coverage

Job summary

Lila Sciences in San Francisco is seeking a highly motivated engineering leader to own and scale our data platform end to end. You will build and lead a 30-40 person data engineering team, shaping architecture, reliability, and developer experience across ingest, storage, processing, and analytics.

You will partner with data scientists and product teams to deliver fast, scalable lakehouse solutions using Kafka, DuckDB, ClickHouse, and cloud primitives on AWS/GCP, while promoting a culture of

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software development experience with data processing at scale.
• 5+ years of experience leading senior engineers.
• Experience with building on AWS/GCP primitives like S3 + Athena/BigQuery, and query engines.
• Operated data platforms at petabyte scale with sub-second query latency requirements.
• Experience managing data infrastructure supporting 100+ concurrent ML workloads.
• Familiarity with LLM/AI-native data patterns — vector stores, embedding pipelines, etc.
• Hands-on coding in Python and modern backend frameworks; IaC and Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Lead and scale a 30-40 person data engineering team.
• Define and execute the technical roadmap for the data platform.
• Ensure reliability, security, and performance of data processing infrastructure.
• Collaborate with data scientists and product teams to deliver data-enabled solutions.
• Represent Lila’s data platform work at external events and publish thought leadership.

Skills

Team Leadership

Real-time streaming

Data Lakehouse

Cloud data platforms

Python

Kubernetes

Data processing at scale

Stakeholder management

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science

Tools

Kafka

Flink

DuckDB

ClickHouse

S3

BigQuery

Kubernetes

Job description

Your Impact at LILA

Lila is seeking a highly motivated and experienced engineering leader to lead a team responsible for our Lila's product data platform. You will own the data platform and infrastructure end-to-end — architecture, delivery, reliability, and developer/data scientist experience.

Our mission is to deliver Scientific Super Intelligence through a reliable, scalable, and self-service infrastructure for data ingestion, storage, processing, and interaction — enabling AI/ML, product teams, and scientists to build data-intensive applications with confidence and speed. Our platform supports analytical and machine learning workloads across Lila, serving autonomous DBTL cycles, instrument data pipelines, and AI inference workflows.

You will be responsible for building and leading a team of talented engineers, driving technical strategy, and ensuring the scalability and performance of our data management and data serving capabilities of our Data Platform. You will work closely with data scientists, data engineers, lab scientists, and product teams to understand their needs and deliver innovative solutions that leverage the power of cutting edge data processing technologies.

What You'll Be Building

• Team Leadership: Build, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of 30-40 data engineering experts. Evaluate and adopt modern data infrastructure - including real-time streaming (Kafka, Flink), columnar engines (DuckDB, ClickHouse), lake house, and cloud-native object storage architectures; Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement; Provide technical guidance and mentorship to team members, promoting their professional growth; Conduct performance reviews, provide feedback, and identify opportunities for training and development; Manage team workload, prioritize projects, and ensure timely delivery of high-quality solutions.
• Technical Strategy and Execution: Define and execute the technical roadmap for our data platform, aligning with Lila’s overall data strategy; Drive innovation in data Lakehouse and data serving ecosystem exploring new technologies and approaches to improve usability, performance, scalability, and efficiency; Ensure the reliability, availability, and security of our data processing infrastructure.; Collaborate with other engineering teams to integrate our data processing technologies with other Lila systems and services.
• Stakeholder Management: Partner with data scientists, data engineers, lab scientists, product managers, and other stakeholders to understand their data processing needs and requirements; Communicate technical concepts and solutions effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences; Advocate for best practices in data processing and engineering; Manage expectations and ensure alignment across different teams.
• Engineering Thought Leadership: Represent Lila’s data platform work at external conferences; Deliver presentations, and write blog posts highlighting Lila’s leadership in big data processing.
• Scientist and Engineering Productivity: Drive innovative, agentic, and low-code solutions to deliver data interfaces - exploration, query, analytics, and ML/inference solutions at scale.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• 12+ years of software development experience, with a focus on data processing at scale. 5+ years of experience leading senior engineers.
• Experience with building on AWS/GCP primitives like S3 + Athena/BigQuery, and query engines.
• Operated data platforms at petabyte scale with sub-second query latency requirements.
• Experience managing data infrastructure supporting 100+ concurrent ML training and inference workloads.
• Familiarity with LLM/AI-native data patterns — vector stores, embedding pipelines, pre/mid/post training.
• Track record of building data platforms in high-growth or early-stage environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long‑term architecture.
• Hands‑on coding in Python and modern backend frameworks. Experience with infrastructure-as-code and containerized deployments (Kubernetes).
• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field of study.

Bonus Points For

• Thought leadership in the community via presentations in conferences or blog posts.
• Experience building and growing teams focusing on open source technologies.
• Scientific data management and quality experience
• Built self‑service data products/platforms where developer experience was a first-class product concern.

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.

• 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
• 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

$300,000 - $390,000 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’re All In

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.

Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.

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.