Lila Sciences · 19 hours ago
Senior Manager, Research Operations
Cambridge, MA
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$148K/yr - $198K/yr
8+ years expLila Sciences is the world’s first scientific superintelligence platform and autonomous lab for life, chemistry, and materials science. This role involves building and leading the Research Operations organization to ensure the delivery of high-quality experimental data, integrating automation and quality control systems to enhance scientific discovery.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)Foundational AILife ScienceSoftware
Responsibilities
Validating scientific workflows directly on automated and semi-automated lab equipment
Executing experiments with accuracy and consistency
Monitoring scientific and operational quality metrics across runs
Generating high-quality, fully observable datasets for AI model training
Collaborating with domain scientists and AI researchers to realize closed-loop learning
Ensuring process consistency and scientific integrity
Maintaining standard operating procedures and quality control frameworks
Performing internal audits and supporting external audits
Maintaining end-to-end data integrity and traceability
Building a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) infrastructure for quality assurance
Design and lead the operational backbone for driving autonomous scientific discovery
Build and deploy the Production and Quality functions for application across life science, chemistry, and materials science
Drive the Research Operations team to maximize AI learnings from the lab
Establish and own a career development framework that nurtures the most energetic and brilliant minds in Research Operations, with career development paths spanning automation engineering, research science, technical and team leadership, and beyond
Partner with Software/Automation to establish observability dashboards, run-booking systems, and data pipelines
Maintain audit-ready traceability, deviations, investigations, and CAPA procedures, where applicable
Build a team culture centered on safety, quality, scientific excellence, and professional growth
Manage vendor Service Level Agreement (SLA) including turnaround time, availability, and quality of research operations and coordinate with internal stakeholders (i.e., LabOps, procurement and science/product teams)
Manage multi-shift coverage, cross-training, and shared instrument scheduling
Work with domain scientists and automation engineers to validate scientific workflows before operationalization
Qualification
Required
8+ years of experience across scientific R&D, high-throughput labs, manufacturing, or instrumentation-heavy environments
Substantial QA/QC and QMS experience
Demonstrated success leading multi-layered scientific and operational teams
Expertise in workflow optimization and SOP/QMS development
Exceptional communication, incident management, and cross-functional leadership skills
Preferred
Experience with lab orchestration systems, automated workcells, and observability pipelines
Familiarity with molecular biology, protein science, chemistry, and materials science
Experience scaling operations from early-stage to production
Technical leadership via publications, patents, or engineering community engagement
Benefits
Bonus potential
Generous early equity
Company
Lila Sciences
Lila Sciences creates a scientific superintelligence platform and autonomous labs for life sciences, chemistry, and materials science. It is a sub-organization of Flagship Pioneering.
201-500 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Lila Sciences has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (8)
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$550MKey Investors
NVenturesFlagship Pioneering
2025-10-14Series A· $115M
2025-09-14Series A· $235M
2025-03-10Seed· $200M
Recent News
2026-01-03
2025-12-17
MIT Technology Review
2025-12-15
Company data provided by crunchbase