Responsibilities

Lila Sciences is building the infrastructure for autonomous science: AI systems that design experiments, run them in physical labs, and close the loop across life sciences, chemistry, and materials science. Our platform enables this to operate reliably at scale for external customers who require security, auditability, and operational rigor.
We're hiring a Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval (Enterprise AI) to own how scientists and agents ask questions of scientific knowledge at Lila: published literature and patents, customer-supplied documents, lab protocols, and the structured experimental record.
Your work will involve building RAG over unstructured text and a scientific knowledge graph that links literature to the structured experimental record.
Enterprise customers require one retrieval platform that any scientific workload can build on, with tenancy enforced in the index and the graph rather than the application layer. You will own that stack end to end, from ingestion to retrieval to cited answers a scientist can trace back to the evidence.
This is a deeply technical senior individual contributor role. We move fast, ship often, and look for engineers who do well with ambiguity and enjoy shaping the problem as much as solving it.
What You'll Be Building
Technical leadership across platform engineering, infrastructure, AI/ML, and scientific teams. Broad architectural influence, high autonomy, direct ownership of critical platform systems.
Define the shared retrieval foundation. Your architecture decisions become the default for scientific workloads across the company, well beyond the first one you ship.
Knowledge graph and graph retrieval. Build one scientific knowledge graph from literature and the structured experimental record. Own graph retrieval and its fusion with vector and lexical search into a single cited answer.
Agentic search. Build the autonomous research loop, from query planning through retrieval to traceable reasoning.
Retrieval quality. Own the retrieval pipeline end to end and the evaluation harness.
Ingestion and extraction. Own the pipeline that turns the many types of scientific data (PDFs, patents, lab protocols, and more) into semantically searchable evidence.

Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval at Lila Sciences · LumiJobs

Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval

Responsibilities

Qualification

Required

Preferred

Benefits

Company

Lila Sciences

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