Lila Sciences · 1 day ago
Senior Principal Software Engineer
San Francisco, CA USA
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$232K/yr - $304K/yr
12+ years expLila Sciences is the world’s first scientific superintelligence platform and autonomous lab for life, chemistry, and materials science. They are seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead the development of AI-driven scientific applications and services, collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure high-quality software systems. This role involves shaping a modern system from the ground up and mentoring junior engineers while establishing best practices in software development.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)SoftwareLife ScienceFoundational AI
Responsibilities
Lead End-to-End Software Development Lifecycle: Drive the technical design, implementation, and maintenance of software systems and applications
Architect & Implement Applications: Design and build robust, scalable web applications and services across the full stack, empowering scientists to harness AI in their research workflows
Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Partner with domain scientists, ML engineers, and product leads to integrate various technologies—ML models, data/compute infrastructure, and experimental automation tools
Establish Organizational Best Practices: Set standards for code quality, testing, and documentation. Mentor junior engineers and foster a culture of knowledge sharing
Operationalize Code in Production: Leverage observability tooling to monitor real world performance and steer improvements
Qualification
Required
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
12+ years of experience successfully building and deploying scalable software systems in production environments
Technical Leadership: Experience leading and mentoring a team and making key architecture decisions. 0→1 product development experience is required
Full Stack Development: Experience developing web apps across the full stack (React, TypeScript, Monorepos like Nx, TailWind, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, Python, Pydantic, Apache Iceberg, DuckDB)
Cloud & DevOps Knowledge: Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure; strong understanding of Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions)
Communication & Collaboration: Leadership skills working cross functionally. Strong verbal and written communication. Acute listening skills, and a proven track record of working cross-functionally with scientists, data engineers, and product teams; able to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences
Preferred
Hands-On with Latest AI Tools: Exposure to AI technologies such as LLMs or agentic frameworks, as well as experience leveraging AI to improve development performance
Experience with ORMs: Experience with and web services for CRUD services (SQLModel, FastAPI, Django)
Orchestration Systems: Experience with orchestrators tools (Airflow, Prefect, Temporal, Flyte)
Familiarity with Python for Science: Familiarity with data science and ML libraries (pandas, numpy, scipy, jax, pytorch)
Domain Background: Exposure to laboratory software or analytics for life sciences, material sciences, or related fields
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
$550.67MKey Investors
ARIANVenturesBraidwell,Collective Global Management
2026-01-20Grant· $0.67M
2025-10-14Series A· $115M
2025-09-14Series A· $235M
Recent News
MIT Technology Review
2026-01-22
2026-01-03
2025-12-17
Company data provided by crunchbase