{"id":4026870,"url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-sciences-ml-research-scientist-environments-harnesses","title":"ML Research Scientist, Environments & Harnesses","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":85,"open_postings":38,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.395,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":85,"computed_at":"2026-11-10T06:52:35Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"junior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States","London, United Kingdom","Cambridge, United States"],"countries":["US","GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":228000,"max":304000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":304000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":2,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Flyte","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"Pydantic","optional":true},{"name":"Ray","optional":true},{"name":"vLLM","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-10T15:37:43Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-10","last_verified_at":"2026-11-10T17:15:24Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Your Impact at LILA\nLila is building a platform where AI and automation co-evolve to accelerate scientific discovery. Our AI Research team is looking to hire a ML Research Scientist to focus on synthetic RL environment pipelines and multi-agent harness design. These core pillars enable efficient scaling at training and test time to unlock scientific discovery. Lila’s scale and unique focus on experimental science means solving novel problems and building infrastructure that scales.\nWhat You'll Be Building\nDesign and prototype new harness capabilities - context compaction strategies, novel tool interfaces, long-horizon planning mechanisms, mult-agent swarms, and other innovations that expand what agents can do.\nInvent new types of RL environments - explore creative ways to turn scientific workflows, simulators, and real-world tasks into training signal.\nBuild end-to-end pipelines for synthetic environment generation - transforming raw assets (papers, codebases, lab protocols) into validated, versioned training environments at scale.\nPrototype and validate environment designs - from initial concept through reward shaping, data collection, and integration with the training loop.\nPush the boundaries of multi-step reasoning - design and implement support for chained tasks, hierarchical goals, and complex evaluation scenarios.\nWhat You'll Need to Succeed\nPhD (or equivalent experience) in Computer Science or a related quantitative field and two years of industry experience.\nA strong track record ideating on new harness designs or creating reinforcement learning environments at scale.\nStrong prototyping and coding skills - comfortable quickly building and iterating on new ideas in Python.\nCreativity and research intuition - ability to identify promising directions, design experiments, and navigate ambiguity.\nFamiliarity with core concepts and algorithms in reinforcement learning.\nSolid software engineering fundamentals - clean code, version control, testing, and ability to integrate experimental work into shared infrastructure.\nBonus Points for\nStrong publication track record at conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.\nBackground in biology, chemistry, or physics - or experience translating domain expertise into computational tasks.\nExperience building developer-facing libraries, APIs, or frameworks (registries, plugin systems, CLIs).\nFamiliarity with distributed compute (Ray, Modal) or LLM inference systems (vLLM, batching strategies).\nExperience with async Python, Pydantic, and workflow orchestration frameworks (Flyte, Airflow).\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$228,000—$304,000 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":5199,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":2,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","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":"2026-11-10T17:15:24Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 29","filings_12m":29,"filings_prev_12m":4,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":157500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-10T11:34:35+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":9}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":85,"reasons":["conf:2","win:early","comp:junior,brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-10T19:17:21Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":304000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-sciences-ml-research-scientist-environments-harnesses","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-sciences-ml-research-scientist-environments-harnesses.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-10T19:17:21Z","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":10217,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-11T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"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-ml-research-scientist-environments-harnesses"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"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-ml-research-scientist-environments-harnesses"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"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-ml-research-scientist-environments-harnesses"},{"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-ml-research-scientist-environments-harnesses\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Flila-sciences-ml-research-scientist-environments-harnesses"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":4026870}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"lila.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":4026870},"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. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}