Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI

Lila Sciences; San Francisco, Cambridge (CA, MA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 336,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Flexible time off

Paid parental leave

Commuter benefits

Company subsidized lunch program

Job summary

Lila Sciences in San Francisco, CA is looking for a Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer to enhance AI models tailored to specific customer scientific needs. This position will work closely with AI Researchers and Software teams to develop reliable workflows, ensuring that frontier model capabilities meet real customer contexts.

You will be responsible for debugging model behavior, designing experiments, and collaborating across teams. The expected base salary ranges from $180,000 to $336,000, alongside competitive benefits and equity opportunities.

Qualifications

• Strong experience in building, training, or evaluating machine learning models.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and modern ML frameworks.
• Experience with distributed ML training frameworks like Megatron-LM.
• Ability to debug model behavior using data and logs.

Responsibilities

• Close the last-mile gap between AI model capabilities and customer workflows.
• Build evaluation loops that measure model quality and reliability.
• Design experiments to improve model performance.
• Partner with AI researchers to translate improvements into usable capabilities.

Skills

Building, training, or evaluating ML models

Software engineering in Python

Experience with PyTorch

Experience with TensorFlow

Distributed ML training frameworks

Designing experiments

Debugging model behavior

Clear communication skills

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Ray

Job description

Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI

Cambridge, MA USA; San Francisco, CA USA

We are growing our Applied AI org and seeking talented Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineers with expertise in LLM training, evaluation, and production-oriented ML systems. You’ll work on improving Lila’s AI models for customer‑specific scientific needs, with a focus on turning frontier model capabilities into reliable workflows that can be evaluated, iterated, and used in real customer contexts. This is a rare chance to join an early team with the autonomy, flexibility, and compute to tackle frontier science problems.

Applied AI sits at the intersection of AI Research, model engineering, and product deployment. The team partners closely with AI Researchers and Software teams to adapt Lila models to customer workflows, improve model quality through experimentation, and ensure model behavior works well end to end inside the application.

This role is ideal for someone who can bridge research and engineering: training or adapting models, building evaluation loops, debugging model behavior, and collaborating across AI and Software to move promising capabilities into production‑quality systems.

What You’ll Be Building

• Close the last‑mile gap between Lila AI model capabilities and customer‑specific scientific workflows.
• Build evaluation loops that measure model quality, reliability, and customer fit.
• Design experiments to improve model performance across applied customer use cases.
• Feed customer learnings, data signals, and evaluation results back into the Lila AI model improvement cycles.
• Partner with AI researchers to translate model improvements into usable capabilities.
• Work with Software to integrate model behavior into end‑to‑end product workflows.
• Debug model failures using traces, evaluations, customer context, and scientific feedback.
• Build reusable tooling for model adaptation, evaluation, and deployment workflows.

What You’ll Need to Succeed

• Strong experience building, training, adapting, or evaluating machine learning models.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
• Experience with distributed ML training frameworks (Megatron‑LM, TorchTitan, DeepSpeed, Ray)
• Experience designing experiments, evaluation metrics, or test sets for model performance.
• Ability to debug model behavior using data, traces, logs, and qualitative feedback.
• Experience working across research and engineering teams to move ML capabilities into usable systems.
• Familiarity with large language models, multi‑modal models, or agentic AI systems.
• Clear communication skills for translating customer needs into technical model improvements.

Bonus Points For

• Experience adapting models for customer‑facing or production workflows.
• Experience with scientific, technical, or data‑intensive customer use cases.
• Experience building evaluation harnesses, model monitoring, or quality dashboards.
• Familiarity with retrieval‑augmented generation, tool use, or agentic workflows.
• Experience with RL post‑training, such as RLHF, GRPO, or tool‑augmented RL.
• Experience training MoE architectures.
• Experience working with product or customer‑facing teams to translate needs into ML improvements.

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

$180,000 - $336,000 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 is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

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