Senior Engineer I/II, Drug Discovery Platform
Lila Sciences2 months ago
Cambridge, MA, USAEntry Level / Mid Level
H1B sponsor
Base Salary
$148k - $240k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and operate the molecule queue connecting AI Scientists with the Make-Test platform, including status state machines, batch grouping, priority semantics, and read/write contracts.
- Build the canonical compound and structure registry with normalization, stereochemistry handling, salt and parent resolution, duplicate detection, and stable internal identifiers.
- Build ingestion pipelines for ChemSpeed synthesis, LCMS, NMR, bioassay readers, and related experimental measurements.
- Maintain synthesis constraints and inventory state, including building blocks, advanced precursors, ChemSpeed capacity, stock alerts, reaction types, step budgets, and solvent compatibility.
- Own data quality, lineage, schema evolution, and service-level agreements for the closed-loop drug discovery cycle.
- Develop backend APIs, data services, storage abstractions, and orchestration for scientific data workflows.
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Chemistry, Computational Biology, or a related field.
- 5+ years of experience building production data platforms.
- Experience designing and shipping ingestion frameworks, registries, storage abstractions, and orchestration systems from the ground up.
- Fluency in backend production APIs and services, Python, and SQL.
- Production experience with relational and/or NoSQL databases, evolving scientific schemas, query optimization, and structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
- Ability to model chemical and biological data and experimental measurements such as structures, reactions, assays, dose-response data, batches, replicates, censored values, and failed runs.
- Experience with AWS and containerized deployment using Kubernetes.
- Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor or Claude Code.
- Hands-on experience with RDKit, OpenEye, or equivalent is a bonus.
- Experience with compound registration systems such as CDD Vault, Dotmatics, or Benchling Registry is a bonus.
- Familiarity with ELNs, LIMS, and instrument data formats such as mzML and AnIML is a bonus.
- Experience with Flyte, Airflow, Dagster, or Temporal is a bonus.
- Experience with Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi, DuckDB, Polars, or Spark is a bonus.
- Experience with ChemSpeed, Chemspeed SWING, Opentrons, or high-throughput screening readers is a bonus.
- Pharma, biotech, or academic drug discovery experience and familiarity with SAR, ADMET, IC50/EC50, and DEL screening are bonuses.
- Experience building infrastructure for agentic and LLM-driven workflows is a bonus.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage for full-time U.S. employees.
- Employer-paid life and disability insurance.
- Flexible time off, generous company-wide holidays, and paid parental leave.
- Educational assistance program.
- Commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office-based employees.
- Company-subsidized lunch program.
- Regionally tailored benefits for full-time employees outside the U.S.
Tech Stack
Categories
BackendData Engineering
About Lila Sciences
Lila Sciences builds an AI-driven research platform and autonomous lab systems for life science, chemistry, and materials R&D teams. Its products combine large AI models with robotic instruments to plan, run, and analyze experiments, integrating into customer-specific scientific workflows. The privately held company serves pharma, materials, and energy organizations and is venture-backed, including a Series A financing in 2025.