Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, Life Sciences

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

Benefits offered by this job

Generous equity

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Employer-paid life and disability

Flexible time off + holidays

Parental leave

Educational assistance

Commuter benefits

Lunch program

Job summary

Lila Sciences seeks a highly capable Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with customer teams and solve problems across biology, data, and AI domains. You'll ship production features rapidly on our platform, balancing scientific insight with software execution.

Ideal candidates have data engineering, full-stack skills, and a passion for translating customer needs into robust solutions with equity and strong benefits.

Qualifications

• Background in biology or related scientific field required.
• Experience with data engineering and ETL pipelines.
• Strong full-stack development across backend, frontend and data layers.
• Excellent communication with external partners and internal teams.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites for deployments.

Responsibilities

• Develop and deploy domain-specific tools for molecular modeling and data analysis.
• Wrap and adapt tools for integration into LILA workflows.
• Build real-time data pipelines transforming scientific data into insights.
• Create intuitive interfaces for AI/ML capabilities for scientists.

Skills

Data engineering

ETL pipelines

Full-stack dev

Partner communication

Autonomy

Problem solving

Tools

TypeScript

React

Job description

Your Impact at LILA

We're seeking extraordinarily talented Forward Deployed Engineers to join our growing team. Our FDEs are high-performing generalists with a broad set of skills across scientific domains and software engineering, in addition to depth in one or more focus areas. As an FDE, you'll embed directly within our internal and external customer facing biotech and science teams, living their problems and rapidly ideating, building, and deploying solutions that transform their capabilities across the Lila platform. You'll leverage our AI and software platform tools while developing custom features that address each customer's unique challenges. This isn't traditional software development—it's high-velocity, AI-fueled, high-impact engineering where you'll ship production code in days, not months.

What You'll Be Building

• Developing, wrapping, and adapting domain-specific tools for molecular modeling, data analysis, process optimization, and more.
• Deploying custom agentic scientific workflows that integrate with industrial instruments (PLCs, control software) and data systems (ERP, MES, SCADA).
• Building real-time data pipelines that transform scientific data into actionable insights.
• Creating intuitive interfaces that make complex AI/ML capabilities accessible to scientists.

What You'll Need To Succeed

• Background in biology, molecular science, or related scientific field.
• Ability to communicate effectively with external partners and internal product and technical leaders.
• Experience with data engineering, ETL pipelines, and working with complex datasets.
• Strong full-stack development skills with the ability to work across backend, frontend, and data layers.
• Exceptional problem-solving abilities and comfort with ambiguous requirements.
• Knack for product discovery and an ability to pass well-defined customer requirements back to the product teams.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites for engineering deployments.

Bonus Points For

• Previous customer-facing or consulting experience.
• Depth in controls engineering and machine learning.
• Experience with scientific computing libraries (NumPy, Pandas, SciPy, RDKit).
• Familiarity with ML/AI implementation and deployment.
• Familiarity with modern web technologies (TypeScript, React)

What Makes a Great FDE

• Customer Obsessed: You're energized by understanding customer problems deeply and seeing your solutions drive real impact.
• Fast Learner: You quickly grasp new scientific domains and translate complex requirements into elegant solutions.
• Autonomous: You thrive with minimal supervision and take extreme ownership of customer success.
• Collaborative: You work seamlessly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Technically Versatile: You're comfortable jumping between technologies and picking up new tools as needed.

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.

• 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.
• a company subsidized lunch program.
• 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 USD - $256,000 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 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.

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