Senior / Principal Chemist, AI Safety

Lila Sciences, Inc.; Cambridge, San Francisco (MA, CA); On-site; USD 148,000 - 208,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus potential

Early-stage equity

Job summary

Lila Sciences, Inc. is building a high-agency AI safety team and seeks a chemist to map risk across chemical sciences, connecting deep chemistry with dual-use risk assessment to safeguard advancing AI capabilities.

The role focuses on translating scientific risk judgments into practical safety boundaries and mitigation requirements. You will collaborate across science, engineering and policy, evaluate emerging threats, and contribute to safeguarding research while preserving the core discovery

Qualifications

• PhD in synthetic chemistry or closely related discipline.
• Background in molecular design and medicinal chemistry, inorganic/organometallic chemistry, synthesis, process development and formulations.
• Experience assessing chemical dual-use risks (national security, export controls, etc.).
• Ability to investigate unfamiliar questions and recognize limits of expertise.
• Ability to identify appropriate specialists and synthesize cross-disciplinary evidence into risk assessments.
• Clear scientific communication and ability to collaborate across science, engineering and policy.

Responsibilities

• Map chemical misuse risks across models, agents and automated experimentation.
• Assess how feasibility, practical constraints and actors' resources affect misuse.
• Differentiate established capabilities, plausible future developments and weakly supported hypotheses.
• Identify gaps and frame questions for consultants and specialist organizations.
• Translate scientific risk judgments into dual-use policy boundaries and mitigation requirements.
• Collaborate with threat modelers, evaluation researchers and mitigation teams.

Skills

Chemistry expertise

Dual-use risk assessment

Scientific judgment

Cross-disciplinary collaboration

Scientific communication

Education

PhD in synthetic chemistry or related field

Tools

Computational modeling

Job description

Cambridge, MA USA; London, UK; San Francisco, CA USA

We're building a talent-dense, high-agency AI safety team at Lila that will engage all core teams within the organization (science, model training, lab integration, etc.), to identify and mitigate risks from scientific superintelligence while retaining the core scientific discovery capabilities of the stack. The initial focus of this team will be to build and implement a bespoke safety strategy for Lila, tailored to its specific goals and deployment strategies. This will involve technical safety strategy development, broader ecosystem engagement, safety-focused evaluations, safety systems to mitigate risks, and a research agenda that explores longer-term needs such as oversight of superintelligent scientific systems.

We are seeking a chemist to map risk across the chemical sciences domain: you will connect deep chemistry expertise with dual-use risk assessment to help safeguard increasingly capable scientific AI. You will investigate how advances in chemical research could change harmful capabilities, including established and emerging chemical threats.

What You’ll Be Building

• Map chemical misuse risks across scientific models, agents and automated experimentation, connecting scientific advances to harmful applications and identifying emerging or overlooked pathways.
• Assess how scientific feasibility, practical complexity and actors' expertise or resources affect the plausibility and likelihood of misuse, including which constraints AI could change.
• Distinguish established capabilities, plausible future developments and weakly supported hypotheses, updating assessments as scientific evidence and AI capabilities evolve.
• Identify gaps in coverage, frame questions for consultants and specialist organizations, and assess and integrate their findings with support from the expert-program team.
• Translate scientific risk judgments into dual-use policy boundaries, evaluation priorities and mitigation requirements that preserve beneficial chemistry.
• Partner with threat modelers, evaluation researchers and mitigation teams to design informative assessments, interpret red-team findings and test safeguards.

What You’ll Need to Succeed

• Deep expertise (a PhD, or comparable experience) in synthetic chemistry or a closely related discipline, demonstrated through substantial research or applied work and sound interpretation of experimental evidence. This includes a background in molecular design and medicinal chemistry, inorganic and organometallic chemistry, synthesis, process development and formulations, or other relevant sub-fields.
• Substantive experience assessing chemical dual-use risks (e.g. across national security, export controls, or other chemical risk tracking such as the CWC).
• Strong scientific judgment about feasibility, uncertainty and practical constraints, including the ability to investigate unfamiliar questions and recognize the limits of your expertise.
• The ability to identify appropriate specialists, critically assess their evidence and combine findings across disciplines into defensible risk assessments.
• Clear scientific communication, independent research judgment and an ability to collaborate across science, engineering and policy.

Bonus Points For

• Prior experience applying domain expertise to AI safety through one or more of: scientific analysis informing threat models; evaluation or red-teaming work; or mitigation design.
• Experience commissioning specialist research or coordinating external scientific collaborators.
• Experience with automated chemistry, scientific modeling or the translation of computational findings into physical experiments.

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.

Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including 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; and 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

$148,000 - $208,000 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 encourage you to apply.

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.

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