{"id":3286970,"url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-sciences-staffprincipal-engineer-search-retrieval","title":"Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval","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":39,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.256,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":85,"computed_at":"2026-10-29T05:49:05Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","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"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":224000,"max":336000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":336000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Graph","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Reranking","optional":false},{"name":"Semantic Search","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"FedRAMP","optional":true},{"name":"GraphRAG","optional":true},{"name":"HIPAA","optional":true},{"name":"LIMS","optional":true},{"name":"OCR","optional":true},{"name":"SOC 2","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-26T17:14:01Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-26","last_verified_at":"2026-10-29T18:27:05Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"description":"Your Impact at LILA\nLila Sciences is building the infrastructure for autonomous science: AI systems that design experiments, run them in physical labs, and close the loop across life sciences, chemistry, and materials science. Our platform enables this to operate reliably at scale for external customers who require security, auditability, and operational rigor.\nWe're hiring a Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval (Enterprise AI) to own how scientists and agents ask questions of scientific knowledge at Lila: published literature and patents, customer-supplied documents, lab protocols, and the structured experimental record.\nYour work will involve building RAG over unstructured text and a scientific knowledge graph that links literature to the structured experimental record.\nEnterprise customers require one retrieval platform that any scientific workload can build on, with tenancy enforced in the index and the graph rather than the application layer. You will own that stack end to end, from ingestion to retrieval to cited answers a scientist can trace back to the evidence.\nThis is a deeply technical senior individual contributor role. We move fast, ship often, and look for engineers who do well with ambiguity and enjoy shaping the problem as much as solving it.\nWhat You'll Be Building\nTechnical leadership across platform engineering, infrastructure, AI/ML, and scientific teams. Broad architectural influence, high autonomy, direct ownership of critical platform systems.\nDefine the shared retrieval foundation. Your architecture decisions become the default for scientific workloads across the company, well beyond the first one you ship.\nKnowledge graph and graph retrieval. Build one scientific knowledge graph from literature and the structured experimental record. Own graph retrieval and its fusion with vector and lexical search into a single cited answer.\nAgentic search. Build the autonomous research loop, from query planning through retrieval to traceable reasoning.\nRetrieval quality. Own the retrieval pipeline end to end and the evaluation harness.\n Ingestion and extraction. Own the pipeline that turns the many types of scientific data (PDFs, patents, lab protocols, and more) into semantically searchable evidence.\nWhat You'll Need to Succeed\n8+ years of software development experience, including production ownership of a search, retrieval, RAG, or knowledge graph system that real users depended on.\nProduction experience building semantic search: embedding models, vector indexes (HNSW/IVF), hybrid lexical and vector retrieval, and reranking. Graph database experience is a strong plus.\nTrack record in high-growth environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long-term architecture.\nYou can describe how you measured retrieval quality (recall, groundedness, citation accuracy) and how you caught regressions.\nHands-on coding in Python and modern backend frameworks (FastAPI, async Python).\nModern cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS).\nStrong cross-functional communication and the ability to influence architecture across teams.\nBS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field of study, or equivalent experience.\nBonus Points For\nShipped RAG or semantic search in a regulated or enterprise context, through security and compliance review under regimes such as SOC 2, HIPAA, GxP (including ALCOA+ data integrity), or FedRAMP.\nPermission-aware retrieval over access-controlled data.\nDocument understanding at scale: OCR, layout-aware parsing, table and figure extraction from scientific literature.\nAgentic retrieval and GraphRAG patterns, and how to evaluate them.\nPlatforms serving scientific or laboratory data such as LIMS, ELN, bioinformatics, or materials informatics, with an understanding of provenance and traceability requirements.\nDomain-specific corpora and scientific ontologies (UMLS, MeSH, ChEBI, GO, UniProt, Materials Project) where specialized vocabulary limits general-purpose embeddings and entity linking.\nKnowledge graph construction and graph retrieval: property graph or RDF stores.\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$224,000—$336,000 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":6717,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"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":"2026-10-26T18:45:27Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":2,"expected_fill_days":85,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-29T05:49:05Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":336000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-sciences-staffprincipal-engineer-search-retrieval","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-sciences-staffprincipal-engineer-search-retrieval.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-29T21:52:39Z","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":32381,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-30T00:00:00Z"}},"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-staffprincipal-engineer-search-retrieval"},{"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-staffprincipal-engineer-search-retrieval"},{"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-staffprincipal-engineer-search-retrieval"},{"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-staffprincipal-engineer-search-retrieval\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Flila-sciences-staffprincipal-engineer-search-retrieval"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3286970}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"lila.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3286970},"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"}}