Senior / Principal Materials Scientist, AI Safety

The role

You will map misuse risks by connecting material properties and performance to harmful applications. You will assess physical feasibility and manufacturing requirements to evaluate the likelihood of misuse. You will work with threat modelers and engineers to assess capabilities and evaluate safeguards.

What you will do

• Map misuse risks by connecting material properties, processing and functional performance to harmful applications
• Assess how physical feasibility, processing complexity, manufacturing requirements and actors' resources affect misuse plausibility
• Distinguish established capabilities, plausible future developments and weakly supported hypotheses
• Identify gaps in expertise and commission targeted scientific input
• Translate dual-use judgments into policy boundaries, evaluation priorities and mitigation requirements
• Work with threat modelers, evaluation researchers and engineering and experimental colleagues to assess capabilities and evaluate safeguards

Required qualifications

• PhD or comparable experience in materials science or a closely related discipline
• Strong grasp of the relationships between structure, properties, processing and applications
• Substantive experience assessing dual-use risks in a relevant area
• Understanding of harmful applications such as nuclear proliferation, radiological misuse, weapons-related capabilities or other consequential materials risks
• Sound judgment about physical possibility, practical feasibility and uncertainty
• Ability to investigate risks beyond your immediate specialism
• Ability to identify appropriate specialists, evaluate technical evidence and synthesize contributions across scientific and security disciplines
• Clear scientific communication
• Independent research judgment
• Ability to collaborate across science, engineering and policy

Nice to have

• Prior experience applying materials or related physical-science expertise to AI safety through threat analysis, evaluations, red teaming, or mitigation design
• Experience commissioning specialist research or assessing emerging technologies across disciplinary boundaries
• Experience with computational materials science, advanced manufacturing or automated synthesis and characterization

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.