Senior ML Scientist, Biological Systems

The posting, as Lila Sciences wrote it

Your Impact at LILA

Lila is redefining the future of medicine by combining automated large-scale data generation with scientific superintelligence. At Lila, we are building the loop where AI, automation, and experimental biology co-evolve to solve the hardest problems in medicine.

The Life Science AI team develops machine learning systems for automated reasoning on biological data, combining state-of-the-art ML with breakthrough biology. We seek a Senior ML Scientist to focus on domain models underneath that system: models of perturbation biology, genetics, and and high-dimensional experimental readouts that connect biological mechanism, experimental intervention and therapeutic opportunity.

At Lila, the data is generated for the model: we run our own experiments at scale, and you will help decide what gets measured. The question is not only what to learn from a fixed dataset, but what datasets should exist. And model outputs are reasoned over. Predictions go to systems and scientists choosing what to run next and making mechanistic calls downstream. Both need to know why, not only what. A model that returns a quantity a biologist, human or AI, can argue with; models that transfer to new contexts, compose into a downstream calculation, and can be checked against an independent measurement are often worth more than a more accurate one that returns an embedding.

What You'll Be Building

• Build domain models for perturbation, genetic, and multimodal experimental data, and translate biological questions into rigorous ML problem formulations. Where the biology supports it, build models with interpretable structure — representations grounded in the machinery that executes a biological process rather than in cell-type identity embeddings, and parameters a biologist can argue with.
• Make uncertainty a deliverable. Calibrated posteriors, honest error bars, and outputs that tell a downstream consumer how much a prediction can actually settle — particularly when predicting into conditions never measured.
• Pre-register and beat baselines. Simple entity-mean, additive, and linear baselines are stated before any model is fit. If the full model does not beat them, we ship the baseline and say so.
• Partner with experimental scientists to guide data generation and model validation — shaping what gets measured, in what contexts, at what precision — and build the experiment-selection methods that choose the next batch of measurements to reduce uncertainty where it matters.
• Design benchmarks that connect model performance to biological and therapeutic consequence, apply model outputs to prioritize targets and mechanisms, and contribute technical direction to high-impact modeling programs.
• Support the integration of domain models into agentic workflows. Deploy tools, help engineer the agent harnesses that incorporate these tools and collaborate on creating environments to train the reasoning models that drive these agents.

What You'll Need to S
[…]
de 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
$268,000 — $358,000 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.

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A Note to Agencies

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