Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval

Lila Sciences, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 224,000 - 336,000; Full time

Job summary

Lila Sciences, Inc. is hiring a Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval (Enterprise AI) in San Francisco, CA.

You will own the stack from ingestion to retrieval, building a unified platform for scientists to query literature, patents, documents, and experimental records with traceable, cited answers. We seek an experienced engineer to lead platform engineering, AI/ML, and data-infra across the retrieval stack, including graph retrieval, embeddings, and multi-modal data ingestion.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience in production systems.
• Experience delivering search/retrieval/knowledge-graph platforms used by real users.
• Strong Python coding and backend framework experience (FastAPI, async Python).
• Experience with embedding models, vector indexes (HNSW/IVF), and hybrid retrieval.
• Ability to measure retrieval quality and detect regressions.
• Cross-functional communication to influence architecture.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the shared retrieval foundation and platform architecture.
• Build a scientific knowledge graph and graph retrieval with vector and lexical fusion.
• Develop agentic search with traceable reasoning and end-to-end retrieval quality.
• Ingest and extract diverse scientific data (PDFs, patents, lab protocols) into searchable evidence.

Job description

Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval

San Francisco, CA USA

Lila Sciences is building the infrastructure for autonomous science: AI systems that design experiments, run them in physical labs, and close the loop across life sciences, chemistry, and materials science. Our platform enables this to operate reliably at scale for external customers who require security, auditability, and operational rigor.

We're hiring a Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval (Enterprise AI) to own how scientists and agents ask questions of scientific knowledge at Lila: published literature and patents, customer-supplied documents, lab protocols, and the structured experimental record.

Your work will involve building RAG over unstructured text and a scientific knowledge graph that links literature to the structured experimental record.

Enterprise customers require one retrieval platform that any scientific workload can build on, with tenancy enforced in the index and the graph rather than the application layer. You will own that stack end to end, from ingestion to retrieval to cited answers a scientist can trace back to the evidence.

This is a deeply technical senior individual contributor role. We move fast, ship often, and look for engineers who do well with ambiguity and enjoy shaping the problem as much as solving it.

What You'll Be Building

• Technical leadership across platform engineering, infrastructure, AI/ML, and scientific teams. Broad architectural influence, high autonomy, direct ownership of critical platform systems.
• Define the shared retrieval foundation. Your architecture decisions become the default for scientific workloads across the company, well beyond the first one you ship.
• Knowledge graph and graph retrieval. Build one scientific knowledge graph from literature and the structured experimental record. Own graph retrieval and its fusion with vector and lexical search into a single cited answer.
• Agentic search. Build the autonomous research loop, from query planning through retrieval to traceable reasoning.
• Retrieval quality. Own the retrieval pipeline end to end and the evaluation harness.
• Ingestion and extraction. Own the pipeline that turns the many types of scientific data (PDFs, patents, lab protocols, and more) into semantically searchable evidence.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• 8+ years of software development experience, including production ownership of a search, retrieval, RAG, or knowledge graph system that real users depended on.
• Production experience building semantic search: embedding models, vector indexes (HNSW/IVF), hybrid lexical and vector retrieval, and reranking. Graph database experience is a strong plus.
• Track record in high-growth environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long-term architecture.
• You can describe how you measured retrieval quality (recall, groundedness, citation accuracy) and how you caught regressions.
• Hands-on coding in Python and modern backend frameworks (FastAPI, async Python).
• Strong cross-functional communication and the ability to influence architecture across teams.
• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field of study, or equivalent experience.

Bonus Points For

• Shipped RAG or semantic search in a regulated or enterprise context, through security and compliance review under regimes such as SOC 2, HIPAA, GxP (including ALCOA+ data integrity), or FedRAMP.
• Permission-aware retrieval over access-controlled data.
• Document understanding at scale: OCR, layout-aware parsing, table and figure extraction from scientific literature.
• Agentic retrieval and GraphRAG patterns, and how to evaluate them.
• Platforms serving scientific or laboratory data such as LIMS, ELN, bioinformatics, or materials informatics, with an understanding of provenance and traceability requirements.
• Domain-specific corpora and scientific ontologies (UMLS, MeSH, ChEBI, GO, UniProt, Materials Project) where specialized vocabulary limits general-purpose embeddings and entity linking.
• Knowledge graph construction and graph retrieval: property graph or RDF stores.

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

$224,000 - $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 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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