Staff Backend Engineer, Lab Software Platform

Lila Sciences; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 192,000 - 256,000; Full time

Job summary

Lila Sciences seeks Staff Software Engineers with backend experience to join Lab Software Team (LaS), building tools for automated scientific analysis and scalable data workflows. You’ll collaborate with software engineers, lab scientists, and ML engineers to ship high-quality software fast.

You will work across UI, APIs, databases, and cloud infrastructure, applying best practices and driving performance, reliability, and maintainability in production systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 8+ years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale systems in production. You must be strong in backend.
• Full Stack Development: Experience developing web apps across the full stack (React, TypeScript, TailWind, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, Python, Pydantic)
• Hands on experience using AI coding assistants to drive productivity is required.
• Communication & Collaboration: Acute listening skills, and a proven track record of working cross-functionally with scientists, data engineers, and product teams; able to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences.
• Problem Solving: Proven ability to take ownership of complex backend challenges, balancing trade-offs between scalability, performance, and maintainability.

Responsibilities

• Design & Build UI and APIs: Design and build high-performance, secure, and well-documented UI and APIs that integrate with AI-driven applications.
• Database Architecture & Scaling: Develop schemas and manage diverse data systems (SQL, NoSQL, Vector DBs, and others) for optimal performance and scalability.
• Application Development: Drive the implementation of front-end and backend services, focusing on performance, maintainability, and reliability.
• Performance & Reliability: Diagnose and optimize system bottlenecks, ensuring high availability and low-latency performance across large-scale workloads.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Leverage AWS services, Kubernetes and modern DevOps practices to build and deploy production-grade systems at scale.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with ML researchers, engineers, and scientists to integrate data pipelines, APIs, and cloud infrastructure into scientific workflows.

Skills

Backend development

Full stack development

React

TypeScript

FastAPI

SQL/NoSQL

Python

Pydantic

AI coding assistants

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Job description

Lila Sciences seeks Staff Software Engineers with backend experience to join Lab Software Team (LaS), building tools for automated scientific analysis and scalable data workflows. You’ll collaborate with software engineers, lab scientists, and ML engineers to ship high-quality software fast.

You will work across UI, APIs, databases, and cloud infrastructure, applying best practices and driving performance, reliability, and maintainability in production systems.