Senior / Principal Chemist, AI Safety

The role

You will map chemical misuse risks across scientific models, agents, and automated experimentation. You will connect deep chemistry expertise with dual-use risk assessment to safeguard scientific AI.

What you will do

• Map chemical misuse risks across scientific models, agents and automated experimentation
• Assess how scientific feasibility, practical complexity and actors' expertise or resources affect misuse plausibility
• Distinguish established capabilities, plausible future developments and weakly supported hypotheses
• Identify gaps in coverage and frame questions for consultants and specialist organizations
• Translate scientific risk judgments into dual-use policy boundaries, evaluation priorities and mitigation requirements
• Partner with threat modelers, evaluation researchers and mitigation teams to design assessments and test safeguards

Required qualifications

• PhD, or comparable experience in synthetic chemistry or a closely related discipline
• Substantial research or applied work and sound interpretation of experimental evidence
• Background in molecular design and medicinal chemistry, inorganic and organometallic chemistry, synthesis, process development and formulations, or other relevant sub-fields
• Substantive experience assessing chemical dual-use risks
• Strong scientific judgment about feasibility, uncertainty and practical constraints
• Ability to identify appropriate specialists and critically assess their evidence
• Clear scientific communication
• Independent research judgment
• Ability to collaborate across science, engineering and policy

Nice to have

• Prior experience applying domain expertise to AI safety through scientific analysis informing threat models, evaluation or red-teaming work, or mitigation design
• Experience commissioning specialist research or coordinating external scientific collaborators
• Experience with automated chemistry, scientific modeling or the translation of computational findings into physical experiments

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.