Staff DevOps Engineer, Software, Product Operations

Lila Sciences, Inc.; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 192,000 - 272,000; Full time

Job summary

Lila Sciences is seeking an experienced Staff/Principal DevOps Engineer to design, implement, and optimize our infrastructure and delivery platforms across cloud and Kubernetes environments. You will bridge platform engineering, site reliability, and DevOps practices to enable fast, reliable software delivery as scientists and ML engineers collaborate on automated analyses.

You will build scalable Kubernetes systems, CI/CD pipelines, and policy-driven infrastructure, and lead reliability efforts

Qualifications

• Expertise in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering for large-scale cloud environments.
• Experience deploying to AWS/GCP using IaC (Terraform, Helm) and containerization.
• Deep experience with CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins) and GitOps.
• Strong proficiency in Python for automation and tooling.
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes operations: deployments, networking, storage, observability, troubleshooting.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and optimize scalable infrastructure and delivery platforms.
• Build Kubernetes-based systems to support services, ML pipelines, and platform workloads.
• Develop CI/CD pipelines with security and compliance best practices.
• Manage infrastructure-as-code, policy-as-code guardrails, and drift detection.
• Ensure reliability with SLOs/SLIs, incident response, and capacity planning.

Skills

DevOps

SRE

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

Python scripting

Kubernetes

Tools

Terraform

Helm

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Jenkins

OPA

Kyverno

Checkov

Job description

Your Impact at LILA

The Staff/Principal DevOps Engineer will drive the design, implementation, and optimization of our infrastructure and delivery platforms. This role bridges platform engineering, site reliability, and DevOps practices, building scalable, automated systems that enable fast, reliable software delivery across cloud and Kubernetes environments. You will collaborate with software engineers, lab scientists, and ML engineers to build infrastructure that powers automated scientific analysis, experiment orchestration, and more.

What You’ll Be Building

• Build Kubernetes-based systems supporting scientific services, ML pipelines, and platform workloads; including production hardening, RBAC, network policies, and Pod Security Standards
• CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions/GitLab CI implementing best practices: build attestations, SBOM generation, dependency scanning, and container image hardening
• Infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and Helm; policy-as-code guardrails (OPA/Kyverno/Checkov) with drift detection
• AWS cloud infrastructure: EKS clusters, IAM least privilege, VPC/PrivateLink networking, KMS/Secrets Manager, ECR, S3, and centralized logging/monitoring
• Platform tooling to streamline deployment, observability, and developer workflows, enabling self-service with secure defaults
• Reliability engineering: SLOs/SLIs, incident response, capacity planning, and performance optimization throughout the stack
• Software supply chain practices: artifact signing, registry governance and vulnerability management
• QA and testing infrastructure: static analysis and code quality gate enforcement in CI pipelines, automated end-to-end and browser-based regression test suites, ephem ... (up to "pre-merge quality checks")
• Automation and tooling in Python or Go to improve infrastructure operations and integrate telemetry with observability platforms

What You’ll Need to Succeed

• Expertise in DevOps, SRE, Systems Engineering, or Platform Engineering in large scale cloud environments
• Expertise in deploying to cloud environments (AWS, GCP, etc) using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm) and containerization
• Deep experience with CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins) and GitOps practices
• Strong proficiency in Python/scripting languages for automation and tooling
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes operations: deployments, networking, storage, observability, and troubleshooting

Bonus Points For

• SRE practices: observability platforms, chaos engineering, incident management
• Securing ML/AI pipelines (model registries, training clusters, inference gateways)
• Experience in regulated/audit-heavy environments (SOC 2, ISO 27001)
• Supply chain security maturity: SBOMs, image signing, SLSA concepts
• Administering static analysis platforms (custom quality profiles, security hotspot triage) and scaling browser-based test suites across parallel CI environments
• Prior startup/high-growth experience balancing velocity with reliability

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

$192,000—$272,000 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.

We’re All In

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.

Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.

A Note to Agencies

Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.