Senior ML Scientist, Life Sciences Foundations

Lila Sciences; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 268,000 - 384,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Life and disability insurance

Flexible time off

Commuter benefits

Bike share program

Lunch program

Job summary

Lila Sciences in San Francisco seeks a Senior/Principal ML Scientist to lead foundation model research for life sciences. Design, train, and deploy large-scale generative models across biological data, collaborating with experimental scientists to close the computational-experimental loop.

The role emphasizes publishing at top venues, developing end-to-end ML systems, and shaping the technical agenda in foundation models for biology.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computational Biology, or a related quantitative field.
• First-author or senior-author publications at premier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, Nature Methods/Biotech).
• Deep expertise in large-scale generative model architectures and training on distributed infrastructure.
• Ability to define research programs end-to-end, from problem framing to deployment.

Responsibilities

• Drive research on foundation models for life science applications (sequence design, structure prediction, multimodal reasoning).
• Design, train, and evaluate large-scale generative models on biological/chemical data with domain priors.
• Lead end-to-end ML processes within Lab-in-the-Loop lifecycle: data strategy, pipelines, feedback loops from experiments.
• Translate biological questions into ML problems and interpret outputs with wet-lab scientists.
• Advance research standards and publish findings at premier venues.
• Represent Lila's work externally through publications and conference talks.

Skills

Generative models

Distributed training

ML frameworks

Cross-functional collaboration

Biology knowledge

Education

PhD in CS/ML/Computational Biology or related field

Tools

AWS

GCP

On-prem clusters

Job description

Lila Sciences in San Francisco seeks a Senior/Principal ML Scientist to lead foundation model research for life sciences. Design, train, and deploy large-scale generative models across biological data, collaborating with experimental scientists to close the computational-experimental loop.

The role emphasizes publishing at top venues, developing end-to-end ML systems, and shaping the technical agenda in foundation models for biology.