Associate Director, App
Hybrid (Cambridge, MA; San Francisco, CA)$204k - $306kfull-timePosted 1mo ago
About the role
Engineering leadership role leading the Application Team to design agents, interfaces, and platform integrations enabling researchers to collaborate with AI across hypothesis-to-result workflows.
Responsibilities
- Build, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of 8-10 engineers spanning full-stack, agent, and platform expertise. Foster collaboration, ownership, and continuous improvement; conduct performance reviews, provide feedback, and identify growth opportunities.
- Manage team workload, prioritize projects, and ensure timely delivery of high-quality solutions.
- Define and execute the technical roadmap for LILA's application layer aligning with broader AI and product strategy.
- Own end-to-end delivery of the application platform — chat, agents, artifacts, and the integrations connecting them to lab workflows and ML pipelines — ensuring reliability, performance, and security.
- Partner with ML researchers, scientists, product managers, and other engineering leaders to translate scientific workflows into product capabilities.
- Represent LILA's applied-AI work externally through conferences, presentations, and writing to attract talent and establish leadership.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- 12+ years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale production systems, with 5+ years leading senior engineers.
- Track record of building and growing high-performing engineering teams in high-growth or early-stage environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long-term architecture.
- Deep technical judgment on Applied AI (agents, MCP, context engineering) and across the full stack (React, TypeScript, Python, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, AWS, Kubernetes).
- Hands-on experience — personally and on the teams you've led — using AI coding assistants and agentic tooling to drive productivity.
- Proven ability to define technical strategy, drive it to execution, and balance trade-offs between scalability, performance, delivery speed, and maintainability.
- Acute listening skills and a proven track record of partnering cross-functionally with scientists, ML engineers, product, and design; able to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences.
Skills
Required:Team leadershipFull-stack developmentApplied AI / agent frameworks
Nice to have:Cloud & DevOps
Benefits
- Full-time U.S. employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer-paid life and disability insurance; flexible time off with generous company-wide holidays; paid parental leave; educational assistance; commuter benefits including bike share memberships; company-subsidized lunch program.
- International Benefits: comprehensive benefits tailored to region; USD salary ranges apply to U.S.-based positions; international salaries set to local market.
Last updated Sep 2, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Lila Sciences
Pioneering Scientific Superintelligence
Pioneering Scientific Superintelligence to solve humankind’s greatest challenges.
Scientific SuperintelligenceAIAutonomous LabsLife SciencesChemical SciencesMaterials Sciences
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