Staff Software Engineer, AI Safety
Lila Sciences7 hours ago
Base Salary
$192k - $272k/yr
Responsibilities
- Build reusable services, libraries, and model/tool integrations for repeatable evaluations, red-teaming campaigns, and mitigation experiments.
- Develop applications that help researchers organize evidence, inspect results, review data, and investigate failures.
- Translate research workflows and technical-user needs into maintainable software while prioritizing shared engineering improvements.
- Build data pipelines and experiment records covering datasets, taxonomies, model versions, configurations, and results.
- Own the reliability and usability of shared safety tools through testing, debugging, monitoring, documentation, and continued improvement.
- Collaborate with AI and software engineering teams to align infrastructure and share tooling.
Requirements
- Independently deliver and maintain production software, including work with ambiguous or changing requirements.
- Strong Python and backend engineering skills, including API design, database work, and dependable data or execution pipelines.
- Experience translating the needs of researchers, domain experts, or other technical users into usable tools across services and interfaces.
- Sound judgment in system design, testing, debugging, reliability, performance, and complexity tradeoffs.
- Engineering experience in AI research, AI safety, scientific computing, or rapidly evolving experimental workflows.
- Clear communication skills and interest in scientific AI safety.
- Preferred experience includes safety-specific tooling, full-stack internal applications, annotation or review tools, experimental evidence systems, distributed experiment execution, model-serving integrations, or isolated environments for agent evaluations.
Benefits
- Competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity.
- Full-time U.S. employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage, 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.
- Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive region-specific benefits.
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.