Senior ML Scientist - Protein Design & Biologics

Lila Sciences; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 215,000 - 358,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical/dental/vision

Life and disability insurance

Flexible time off

Paid parental leave

Educational assistance

Commuter benefits

Office lunch program

Job summary

Lila Sciences is seeking a senior individual contributor to advance computational biologics design. You will work at the intersection of ML, protein engineering, and therapeutic design, partnering with experimental scientists and platform teams to connect design models to the autonomous science platform.

You will own ML workflows for protein campaigns, apply de novo generation and structure-based predictions, and translate biological questions into well-defined ML problems with rigorous

Qualifications

• PhD in Computational Biology, Computer Science, ML, Biophysics, Bioengineering, or related quantitative field.
• Strong track record applying ML to protein design or related biomolecular design problems; industry experience preferred.
• Deep ML expertise with hands-on experience developing AI methods.
• Strong intuition for therapeutic biologics design including sequence, structure, function, developability, and validation.
• Ability to drive applied research from problem definition through validation and iteration.
• Excellent collaboration and communication across ML, biology, experimental science, and software teams.

Responsibilities

• Own applied ML workflows for protein engineering campaigns, from design specification through experimental learning.
• Develop and adapt methods spanning de novo generation, sequence- or structure-based property prediction, candidate selection, and active learning. Integrate these methods into robust software systems and broader reasoning models.
• Translate therapeutic and biological questions into well-defined ML problems, model outputs, and evaluation plans.
• Partner with experimental scientists to interpret why designed biomolecules succeed or fail, then turn those insights into better models and design principles.
• Build rigorous evaluation frameworks for model generalization to challenging biologics design problems.

Skills

ML for protein design

Biomolecular design

Independent research

Collaboration skills

Education

PhD in Computational Biology or related

Job description

Lila Sciences is seeking a senior individual contributor to advance computational biologics design. You will work at the intersection of ML, protein engineering, and therapeutic design, partnering with experimental scientists and platform teams to connect design models to the autonomous science platform.

You will own ML workflows for protein campaigns, apply de novo generation and structure-based predictions, and translate biological questions into well-defined ML problems with rigorous