Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval

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

Job summary

Lila Sciences is hiring a Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval (Enterprise AI) to own how scientists query knowledge across literature, patents, documents, and the experimental record. You will build one retrieval platform with tenancy in the index and graph, end-to-end from ingestion to cited answers, and lead this technical senior IC role.

We move fast, embrace ambiguity, and value cross-functional influence across platform, AI/ML, and scientific teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience and production ownership of a search/retrieval/knowledge graph system.
• Experience building semantic search with embeddings, vector indexes, and hybrid retrieval.
• Track record in high-growth environments with fast value delivery.
• Ability to measure retrieval quality and detect regressions.
• Hands-on Python coding and modern backend frameworks (FastAPI, async Python).

Responsibilities

• Own ingestion to retrieval to cited answers end to end for enterprise AI workloads.
• Provide technical leadership across platform engineering, AI/ML, and scientific teams.
• Define the shared retrieval foundation for scientific workloads company-wide.
• Build the knowledge graph from literature and structured records; own graph retrieval.
• Develop agentic search and an autonomous research loop with traceable reasoning.
• Oversee the retrieval pipeline quality and the evaluation harness.
• Ingest diverse scientific data into semantically searchable evidence.

Skills

Search system ownership

Semantic search

Vector indexes

Graph database experience

High-growth environments

Retrieval quality measurement

Python coding

FastAPI

Kubernetes

Terraform

AWS

Cross-functional communication

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

FastAPI

Kubernetes

Terraform

AWS

Job description

Your Impact at LILA

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.

What You're Hiring to be

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).
• Modern cloud‑native architectures (Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS).
• 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 USD - $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.

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.

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.