{"id":3286973,"url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-sciences-associate-directordirector-inference-engineering","title":"Associate Director/Director, Inference Engineering","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":86,"open_postings":39,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.359,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":78,"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"}},"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":348000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":348000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"KV Cache","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Quantization","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"Speculative Decoding","optional":false},{"name":"TensorRT-LLM","optional":false},{"name":"TGI","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false},{"name":"AWQ","optional":true},{"name":"GPTQ","optional":true},{"name":"TensorRT","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-26T17:13:14Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-26","last_verified_at":"2026-11-01T14:44:08Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":6,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":6},"description":"Your Impact at LILA\nLila is hiring an Associate Director/Director, Inference Engineering to lead the team responsible for Lila's model serving platform: the inference APIs, serving frameworks, request routing, batching strategies, and deployment systems that bring models reliably to production.\nYou will define how Lila serves models at scale, balancing latency, throughput, quality, and cost, and act as the technical authority connecting research and ML to production-grade serving capabilities. The work spans people leadership, service ownership, cross-functional partnership, and deep technical judgment in modern LLM serving.\nWhat You'll Be Building\nOwn the inference service end to end: API contracts, latency SLAs, throughput guarantees, rate limits\nDrive serving architecture decisions: batching, KV cache, speculative decoding, quantization, multi-node deployment\nEstablish SLOs for latency, throughput, and availability, plus on-call and postmortem practices\nPartner with ML, research, and product engineering to make new models production-ready\nBuild systems for model onboarding, deployment safety, evaluation gates, and observability\nBuild, mentor, and retain a high-performing engineering team, and own the serving roadmap\nWhat You'll Need to Succeed\nDeep understanding of the inference stack for large language models, including serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, TGI), batching strategies, memory constraints, and latency/throughput tradeoffs\nExperience owning a customer- or product-facing API service end to end, including SLAs, incident response, and service reliability in fast-moving environments\nTrack record hiring, mentoring, and retaining senior technical talent, and scaling engineering organizations through rapid growth\nStrong technical judgment across latency, throughput, reliability, cost, and delivery speed\nDemonstrated ability to set technical strategy and execute as priorities change\nAbility to align ML, research, product engineering, and executive stakeholders with competing priorities\nBonus Points For\nHands-on experience with speculative decoding, quantization (AWQ, GPTQ, FP8), or model parallelism strategies\nExperience with serving evaluation: output quality regression testing, A/B routing, and shadow deployments\nFamiliarity with GPU capacity planning, instance provisioning, utilization, and cloud cost modeling\nPrior work in AI/ML startups or research-heavy organizations\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—$348,000 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":5059,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"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":"2026-10-26T18:45:27Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":5,"expected_fill_days":78,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":348000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-sciences-associate-directordirector-inference-engineering","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-sciences-associate-directordirector-inference-engineering.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-01T17:46:34Z","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":27245,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-02T00:00:00Z"}},"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-sciences-associate-directordirector-inference-engineering"},{"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-sciences-associate-directordirector-inference-engineering"},{"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-sciences-associate-directordirector-inference-engineering"},{"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-sciences-associate-directordirector-inference-engineering\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Flila-sciences-associate-directordirector-inference-engineering"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3286973}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"lila.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3286973},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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