Director/ Senior Director, Lab Platform Engineering

The role

You will lead a team of 10 to 15 engineers to build and operate hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure. You will own the platform strategy for distributed lab sites and manage the systems supporting automated labs.

What you will do

• Build and lead a team of 10 to 15 engineers, including managers and tech leads.
• Set multi-year technical vision and strategy for hybrid edge and cloud infrastructure.
• Own platform roadmap and delivery.
• Own fleet operations and reliability, including service levels, on-call, and incident response.
• Own infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor relationships.
• Partner cross-functionally with robotics, lab operations, research, and security.
• Communicate platform strategy and tradeoffs to executives.
• Raise the engineering bar through standards, review practices, and technical thought leadership.

Required qualifications

• 15+ years in software or infrastructure engineering
• 8+ years leading teams, including managing managers or tech leads, or equivalent practical experience
• Track record building and scaling a platform or infrastructure organization from a small team upward
• Deep technical grounding in hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes operated at scale outside the public cloud
• Experience operating production fleets against explicit reliability targets, with ownership of on-call and incident practice
• Ownership of infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor negotiation
• Proven cross-functional and executive partnership, including communicating technical tradeoffs to non-engineering leaders
• Demonstrated ability to hire and develop senior and principal-level engineers

Nice to have

• Scientific domain: laboratory automation, robotics, or hardware-adjacent platforms; lab software for life sciences or materials science
• Distributed and edge systems: multi-site operations, intermittently connected environments, over-the-air software rollout
• Security and compliance: identity and secrets management across hybrid environments, operating in regulated or audited settings
• Platform practice: infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, developer experience as a product, AI-assisted engineering workflows adopted across a team
• Organizational: standing up a new function, integrating acquired or transferred teams, managing a team split across offices and remote

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. The company combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science.