Director, Sustaining Engineering & Lab Operations

Responsibilities

• Build the Local Site Sustaining Engineering function from scratch, incorporating Maintenance Engineering (instrument PM, calibration, troubleshooting)
• Own fleet reliability, incident response, and AISF health, including on-call rotations and RCA libraries
• Manage deployment, commissioning, and operational readiness for new sites
• Execute change control models for platform-critical and site-local changes
• Define and own the operating model across Lila sites, including org structure and staffing
• Set and track KPIs such as fleet uptime, MTTR, and PM compliance
• Own end-to-end supply chain continuity for lab consumables, reagents, and PPE
• Support CMMS implementation and equipment asset management
• Lead AI-enabled site operations including predictive maintenance and anomaly detection
• Manage vendor relationships for lab supplies, service contracts, and logistics
• Lead, grow, and develop the team across multiple shifts and sites

Requirements

• 12–15+ years of engineering and operations experience
• Primary background in sustaining engineering, reliability engineering, or site-level engineering execution
• Experience with complex hardware-software integrated systems (automation, robotics, semiconductor, or medical devices)
• Proven track record of owning fleet reliability and root cause analysis at scale
• Experience operating within or building structured change control models
• Experience building and leading multi-functional teams across multiple sites or shifts
• Strong strategic and systems-level thinking

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a biotech or lab-based environment (consumables, reagents, IQ/OQ/PQ)
• Experience building or overseeing a LabOps or instrument Maintenance Engineering function
• Experience with equivalence or drift-based qualification frameworks
• Experience applying AI or intelligent automation to equipment health
• Deep expertise in CMMS selection, implementation, and governance

About the Company

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously.