Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval
$224k - $336k • San Francisco, CA USA • Full-time
Posted 5d ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
Full-time
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
Lila Sciences is building the infrastructure for autonomous science, creating AI systems that design and execute experiments across life sciences, chemistry, and materials science. The platform is designed for reliability and scale, serving external customers who require security, auditability, and operational rigor. This role focuses on enabling scientists and AI agents to query scientific knowledge, including literature, patents, customer documents, and experimental records, through advanced retrieval systems.
Responsibilities
- Define and lead the shared retrieval foundation architecture for scientific workloads.
- Build and own a scientific knowledge graph, integrating literature and experimental records.
- Develop graph retrieval capabilities and fuse them with vector and lexical search for cited answers.
- Create agentic search capabilities for autonomous research loops, including query planning and traceable reasoning.
- Own the end-to-end retrieval pipeline and its evaluation harness.
- Develop and manage the ingestion and extraction pipeline for various scientific data types into a semantically searchable format.
Requirements
- 8+ years of software development experience, with production ownership of search, retrieval, RAG, or knowledge graph systems.
- Production experience building semantic search, including embedding models, vector indexes, hybrid retrieval, and reranking.
- Experience with graph databases is a strong plus.
- Proven ability to measure retrieval quality (e.g., recall, groundedness, citation accuracy) and detect regressions.
- Hands-on coding in Python and modern backend frameworks like FastAPI.
- Experience with modern cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS).
- Strong cross-functional communication and architectural influence skills.
- BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
Benefits
- Competitive base compensation with bonus potential
- Generous early-stage equity
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage (U.S.)
- Employer-paid life and disability insurance (U.S.)
- Flexible time off with generous company-wide holidays (U.S.)
- Paid parental leave (U.S.)
- Educational assistance program (U.S.)
- Commuter benefits, including bike share memberships (U.S.)
- Company-subsidized lunch program (U.S.)
- Regionally tailored benefits for international employees