Principal Software Engineer, Full Stack
Lila Sciences is seeking a Principal Software Engineer with full-stack expertise to join their software group in San Francisco, CA. This role involves designing, building, and optimizing backend systems that power AI-driven scientific applications. The engineer will focus on developing user interfaces, services, high-performance APIs, and databases, ensuring the reliability of services that integrate advanced AI frameworks with complex scientific analytics and laboratory workflows.
Key responsibilities include designing and building high-performance, secure, and well-documented UIs and APIs that integrate with AI-driven applications. The engineer will develop schemas and manage diverse data systems (SQL, NoSQL, Vector DBs, and others) for optimal performance and scalability. They will drive the implementation of front-end and backend services, focusing on performance, maintainability, and reliability. Additionally, the role involves diagnosing and optimizing system bottlenecks to ensure high availability and low-latency performance across large-scale workloads. Leveraging AWS services, Kubernetes, and modern DevOps practices to build and deploy production-grade systems at scale is also a key aspect of the position. Collaboration with ML researchers, engineers, and scientists to integrate data pipelines, APIs, and cloud infrastructure into scientific workflows is essential.
The ideal candidate will have a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, with 8-15 years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale systems in production. Strong experience with React and TypeScript is required. Expertise in databases, including SQL, NoSQL, and emerging technologies like Vector DBs, with a proven track record in schema design, indexing, and query optimization, is essential. Proven ability to design and scale RESTful or GraphQL APIs with a focus on reliability and performance is necessary. Hands-on experience using AI coding assistants to drive productivity is required. The candidate should possess acute listening skills and a proven track record of working cross-functionally with scientists, data engineers, and product teams, with the ability to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences. A demonstrated ability to take ownership of complex backend challenges, balancing trade-offs between scalability, performance, and maintainability, is also important.
Lila Sciences offers competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity. The expected base salary range for this role is $204,000 - $348,000 USD. Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program, including medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer-paid life and disability insurance; flexible time off with generous company-wide holidays; paid parental leave; an educational assistance program; commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office-based employees; and a company-subsidized lunch program.
Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. They 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. Guided by core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, they move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance.