Your Impact at LILA
Lila is building toward scientific superintelligence, and the AI Platform team is responsible for the compute, storage, and tooling that lets researchers train, evaluate, and iterate on increasingly capable models. As the platform scales, the surface area of cross-functional coordination including vendor relationships, governance, utilization, support and observability grows faster than any single engineering team can absorb. We are looking for a Senior or Principal Technical Program Manager to bring structure, accountability, and momentum to that coordination work.
You will sit at the center of the AI Platform team's programs and serve as the connective tissue between platform engineering, AI research, vendor partners, and the Lila teams that depend on us. You will drive multi-quarter programs across compute, storage, utilization, support, and evaluation infrastructure, and you must be genuinely curious about how the platform works, being able to clearly articulate what each program is trying to deliver. The successful candidate thrives in ambiguity, communicates exceptionally well across audiences, and knows how to build clarity and momentum on a fast-paced, rapidly scaling team.
What You'll Be Building
- Drive the compute fleet scale-up program: coordinate fleet management upgrades, consolidate governance policies into an actionable framework, and partner teams and leadership to keep governance and capacity-sharing on track.
- Lead the unified storage strategy balancing cost, compliance, and researcher workflows; design training and adoption campaigns and stand up a feedback loop from researchers.
- Build a systematic cluster utilization program: define the metrics framework, align requirements for observability tooling, engage with teams running under-utilizing workloads, and shape targeted interventions across platform, libraries, training, and documentation.
- Own the ML software platform vendor partnership: manage the vendor relationship, ensure the team extracts full value from vendor engineers, and define metrics that demonstrate return on the investment.
- Stand up a data-driven researcher support and user experience program: establish visibility into ticket volume, resolution time, and categories; execute on UX improvements; and develop proactive insights into how researchers use the cluster.
- Define and build the eval leaderboard program: gather requirements from researchers and stakeholders, shape the leaderboard and dashboard system, and ensure researchers have the guidance to use it effectively.
- Maintain structured working relationships with partner teams across Lila; identify, log, and track the cross-team programs that emerge from those collaborations.
What You'll Need to Succeed
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 8+ years of program or project management experience in technology, infrastructure, or platform engineering organizations.
- Proven experience leading multi-workstream platform or infrastructure programs to successful completion across distributed teams.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to turn technical and operational requirements into actionable roadmaps and metrics.
- Track record of driving accountability without direct authority across engineering, research, and vendor stakeholders.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; track record of producing executive-quality documents, roadmaps, and updates that drive decisions.
Bonus Points For
- Direct experience in AI/ML research, infrastructure, or platform organizations, ideally driving programs that serve researcher or engineering users.
- Working familiarity with compute infrastructure, storage architecture, cluster utilization, or observability tooling, sufficient to engage credibly with platform engineers.
- Experience managing strategic vendor relationships and measuring return on partnership investments.
- Experience standing up support, UX, or user-feedback programs in technical environments.
Compensation
We offer competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity. Your final offer will reflect your background, expertise, and expected impact.
U.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.
International 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.
Expected Base Salary Range
$192,000—$306,000 USD
About LILA
Lila 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.
LILA 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.
Guided 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.
We’re All In
Lila 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.
Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.
A Note to Agencies
Lila 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.