Principal Scientist/Associate Director, Agentic AI Research for Materials Science

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for agentic AI systems applied to materials science
• Define and execute the agentic AI roadmap, including agentic frameworks and RAG
• Lead the design of agentic frameworks grounded in scientific understanding
• Hire, mentor, and grow a small cross-functional team of scientists and engineers
• Partner with diverse teams to integrate systems with experimental infrastructure
• Track state-of-the-art in agentic AI, scientific ML, and reasoning models

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Materials Science, Chemistry, Physics, or related field
• 5+ years of post-PhD research and applied ML experience
• Track record of building and shipping agentic systems or autonomous research workflows
• Deep expertise in LLMs, agentic frameworks, tool use, planning, and multi-modal data
• Working knowledge of materials science, computational chemistry, or condensed-matter physics
• Proficiency in Python and the ML software stack
• Experience leading scientists and engineers

Preferred Qualifications

• Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in agentic AI or scientific ML
• Experience integrating agents with real-world materials science tasks
• Production experience with workflow orchestration and distributed compute on cloud or HPC
• Community recognition such as invited talks or conference organizing

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.