{"id":177608,"url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-associate-director-app","title":"Associate Director, App","company":{"id":65163,"name":"Lila Sciences","domain":"lila.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/lila-ai","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":89,"open_postings":48,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.25,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":70,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Cambridge, United States","San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":204000,"max":306000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":306000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"CloudFormation","optional":true},{"name":"Copilot","optional":true},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":true},{"name":"Knowledge Graph","optional":true},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":true},{"name":"RAG","optional":true},{"name":"Terraform","optional":true},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-27T18:15:38Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-02","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T08:47:38Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":51,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":51},"description":"Your Impact at LILA\nScientists shouldn't have to context-switch between a dozen tools to go from hypothesis to result. We're building the platform that makes this a reality - and we need engineering leaders who want to build the team that solves problems no one has solved before.\nWe're hiring an Associate Director of Engineering, Application Team to lead the engineers designing the agents, interfaces, and platform integrations that let researchers seamlessly collaborate with AI.\nAbout The Team\nThe Application Team sits at the center of LILA - the integration point where Machine Learning, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Software become one AI-native experience that carries a scientist from hypothesis to experiment to breakthrough results.\nAI isn't a feature here - it's the architecture. Agent frameworks, tools, and LLM orchestration are core primitives, not bolt-ons.\nThe problems are genuinely hard. Connecting AI to automated lab workflows, ML pipelines, and multi-domain knowledge graphs means inventing patterns, not copying them.\nYou'll lead engineers who learn domains they never expected. Working shoulder-to-shoulder with lab scientists and ML engineers means your team's technical surface area grows fast.\nYour team ships things that matter. The tools they build accelerate research timelines from months to days.\nIf you want to lead at the intersection of AI and science, move fast, and grow the kind of team that can architect systems that don't exist yet - we want to talk.\nWhat You'll Be Building\nTeam Leadership: Build, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of 8-10 engineers spanning full-stack, agent, and platform expertise. Foster a culture of collaboration, ownership, and continuous improvement; conduct performance reviews, provide feedback, and identify opportunities for growth. Manage team workload, prioritize projects, and ensure timely delivery of high-quality solutions.\nTechnical Strategy & Execution: Define and execute the technical roadmap for LILA's application layer aligning with LILA's broader AI and product strategy. Drive innovation in how scientists interact with AI-driven systems.\nProduct Delivery: Own end-to-end delivery of the application platform - chat, agents, artifacts, and the integrations connecting them to lab workflows and ML pipelines - ensuring reliability, performance, and security across everything the team ships.\nCross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with ML researchers, scientists, product managers, and other engineering leaders to understand scientific workflows and translate them into product capabilities. Communicate technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences; manage expectations and ensure alignment across teams.\nEngineering Thought Leadership: Represent LILA's applied-AI work externally through conferences, presentations, and writing - helping attract top talent and establishing LILA's leadership at the intersection of AI and science.\nWhat You'll Need To Succeed\nBachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.\n12+ years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale production systems, with 5+ years leading senior engineers.\nTrack record of building and growing high-performing engineering teams in high-growth or early-stage environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long-term architecture.\nDeep technical judgment on Applied AI (agents, MCP, context engineering) and across the full stack (React, TypeScript, Python, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, AWS, Kubernetes).\nHands-on experience - personally and on the teams you've led - using AI coding assistants and agentic tooling to drive productivity.\nProven ability to define technical strategy, drive it to execution, and balance trade-offs between scalability, performance, delivery speed, and maintainability.\nAcute listening skills and a proven track record of partnering cross-functionally with scientists, ML engineers, product, and design; able to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences.\nBonus Points For\n Applied AI Engineering leadership: Experience shipping products built on AI agents, graph-based workflows, tool-use protocols (MCP), RAG pipelines, or LLM orchestration frameworks.\nAI-native product intuition: A point of view on what \"good\" looks like for chat, agent, and copilot experiences - and how to evolve it as the underlying models improve.\n Cloud & DevOps depth: Familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and CI/CD (GitHub Actions).\nThought leadership in the applied-AI community via conference talks, blog posts, or open source.\nScientific domain exposure: Experience with laboratory software, analytics for life sciences or material sciences, or adjacent scientific computing domains.\nCompensation\nWe offer competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity. Your final offer will reflect your background, expertise, and expected impact.\nU.S. Benefits. 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.\nInternational Benefits. Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market.\nExpected Base Salary Range\n$204,000—$306,000 USD\nAbout LILA\nLila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. We 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.\nLILA 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. Learn more at www.lila.ai.\nGuided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.\nWe’re All In\nLila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.\nInformation you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.\nA Note to Agencies\nLila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7421,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":12,"management_years_min":5,"team_size_min":8,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Flexible time off","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Materials Science & Nanotechnology","Laboratory & Pharmaceutical Robotics","AI Research Labs","AI for Science"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-30T23:46:07Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":54,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":0.6,"age_days":50,"expected_fill_days":70,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:late","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":306000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-associate-director-app","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-associate-director-app.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T09:13:24Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":13715,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":65163},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=65163"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Flila-associate-director-app"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Flila-associate-director-app"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Flila-associate-director-app"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/lila-associate-director-app\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Flila-associate-director-app"}]}