Associate Director, App

The role

You will lead a team of 8-10 engineers designing agents, interfaces, and platform integrations. You will define the technical roadmap for the application layer and own the end-to-end delivery of the application platform.

What you will do

• Build, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of 8-10 engineers
• Conduct performance reviews and provide feedback
• Manage team workload and prioritize projects
• Define and execute the technical roadmap for LILA's application layer
• Drive innovation in how scientists interact with AI-driven systems
• Own end-to-end delivery of the application platform
• Partner with ML researchers, scientists, product managers, and engineering leaders
• Communicate technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences
• Represent LILA's applied-AI work externally through conferences, presentations, and writing

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
• 12+ years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale production systems
• 5+ years leading senior engineers
• Track record of building and growing high-performing engineering teams in high-growth or early-stage environments
• Deep technical judgment on Applied AI (agents, MCP, context engineering) and across the full stack (React, TypeScript, Python, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, AWS, Kubernetes)
• Hands-on experience using AI coding assistants and agentic tooling

Nice to have

• Experience shipping products built on AI agents, graph-based workflows, tool-use protocols (MCP), RAG pipelines, or LLM orchestration frameworks
• AI-native product intuition
• Familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
• Thought leadership in the applied-AI community via conference talks, blog posts, or open source
• Experience with laboratory software, analytics for life sciences or material sciences, or adjacent scientific computing domains

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Employer-paid life and disability insurance
• Flexible time off with generous company wide holidays
• Paid parental leave
• Educational assistance program
• Commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office based employees
• Company subsidized lunch program

About the company

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science.