Responsibilities

Lila Sciences is hiring Automation Engineers for the AI Science Factory (AISF), the automated platform behind our work in drug discovery, bioengineering, and advanced materials. You will join Sustaining Engineering & Lab Operations (SELO), the group responsible for keeping the platform running and improving it. You own both halves of that: operating and recovering the workcells through your shift, and developing the changes that make them more reliable and higher throughput.
SELO is a multidisciplinary group of automation, mechanical, and controls engineers, staffed across shifts. Most problems worth your time cross those lines — a scheduling error that turns out to be a sensor, a throughput ceiling that turns out to be a gripper tolerance. You will bring the operational evidence and work the problem with them to a real fix.
The platform runs production across shifts, so improvement work is not something you fit into idle time. You plan it, negotiate the downtime with Research Operations, schedule it into an approved window, and verify the change held before returning the system to service. Doing that well takes as much coordination as engineering.
Handoff is part of the job rather than an afterthought. You give and receive a structured handoff at shift overlap, and document events, decisions, and open issues clearly enough that the other shift can act on them without coming back to you.
This is a full-time, on-site role in Cambridge, MA.
This role is shift-based, and we are hiring for both shifts:
First shift — 7:00 AM–3:00 PM, weekdays
Second shift — 2:00–10:00 PM, weekdays
The shifts overlap for one hour so the outgoing and incoming engineers can hand off directly. Shift assignments are permanent rather than rotating — you will not be moved between shifts. Both shifts carry the same responsibilities, the same level expectations, and the same development ownership. Let us know your preference when you apply.
What You'll Be Building
Own operation of the AISF workcells during your shift — triage instrument faults, software errors, and run failures as they surface, recover stalled runs, and decide what gets resolved in shift versus stabilized and carried across the handoff.
Drive continuous improvement of the systems and workflows you operate: identify where reliability, throughput, or recoverability falls short, propose the change, and see it through implementation and verification.

Automation Engineer I/II, Sustaining Engineering & Lab Operations at Lila Sciences · LumiJobs

Automation Engineer I/II, Sustaining Engineering & Lab Operations

Responsibilities

Qualification

Required

Preferred

Benefits

Company

Lila Sciences

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