Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval
Lila Sciences4 hours ago
Base Salary
$224k - $336k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead architecture across platform engineering, infrastructure, AI/ML, and scientific teams.
- Define and own the shared enterprise retrieval foundation for scientific workloads.
- Build a scientific knowledge graph connecting literature to structured experimental records.
- Develop graph retrieval and fuse graph, vector, and lexical search into cited answers.
- Build agentic search from query planning through retrieval and traceable reasoning.
- Own retrieval quality, evaluation harnesses, regression detection, ingestion, and document extraction pipelines.
- Turn PDFs, patents, lab protocols, and other scientific data into semantically searchable evidence.
- Implement tenancy and permission-aware retrieval for enterprise customers.
Requirements
- 8+ years of software development experience, including production ownership of a search, retrieval, RAG, or knowledge graph system used by real users.
- Production experience with semantic search, embedding models, vector indexes such as HNSW and IVF, hybrid lexical/vector retrieval, and reranking.
- Hands-on coding experience with Python and modern backend frameworks including FastAPI and async Python.
- Experience with modern cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS.
- Ability to measure retrieval quality using recall, groundedness, citation accuracy, and regression testing.
- Track record in high-growth environments and ability to influence architecture across teams.
- BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Preferred experience includes enterprise or regulated RAG/search, permission-aware retrieval, OCR, layout-aware parsing, table and figure extraction, agentic retrieval, GraphRAG, scientific data platforms, scientific ontologies, and property graph or RDF stores.
Benefits
- Competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity.
- U.S. full-time employees receive medical, dental, vision, employer-paid life and disability insurance, flexible time off, company-wide holidays, paid parental leave, educational assistance, commuter benefits including bike-share memberships for office-based employees, and subsidized lunch.
- International full-time employees receive regionally tailored benefits.
- The posting applies USD salary ranges only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market.
Tech Stack
Categories
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.