Director/ Senior Director, Applied AI

As the Director/Sr. Director of Applied AI you will be leading the build of our foundational Applied AI team that will fine-tune and adapt our models for real-world product use, make it safely accessible for diverse customer data, and deliver reliable interfaces (chat experiences and high-performance inference endpoints such as gRPC/HTTP/PCP servers). You will be reporting directly to the CTO and will own the roadmap from data to deployment, partner closely with Research, Product, Software, App, Safety, and Security teams, and ship models that are usable, measurable, and trustworthy.

• Build and lead a high-performing Applied AI team to deliver best-in-class scientific reasoning models for consumer applications
• Own an end-to-end model customization pipeline to create valuable models from Lila’s base models for high-value use cases including inference, chat, and Lila’s API
• Create an integrated evaluation framework for continuous model development and improvement
• Partner with cross-functional teams to define requirements, deliver customer POCs, and transition successful pilots into scalable products
• Set technical standards, documentation, and incident response for AI systems in production
• Recruit, mentor, and grow a diverse team

• 8+ years in applied ML/ML systems with 3+ years leading teams; track record shipping LLM systems to production
• Deep experience fine-tuning and evaluating large models for customer interaction
• Production inference expertise: serving frameworks (Triton, vLLM, TGI, Ray, Kubernetes), GPU orchestration, caching, and observability
• Data privacy and security best practices for multi-tenant systems

• Experience instruction fine tuning and hillclimbing therein.
• Experience building chat UX, guardrails, tool/function calling, and long-context strategies
• Knowledge of quantization/distillation, routing/mixture-of-experts, and cost optimization at scale
• Experience working in compliance-heavy environments (HIPAA, PCI, FedRAMP) and on-prem/VPC deployments

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. We believe science is the most inspiring frontier for AI. Rather than hard-coding expert knowledge into tools, LILA builds systems that can learn for themselves.

LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai.

Guided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.

Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

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