Associate Director, App

About the role

The Associate Director of Engineering, Application Team leads a team of engineers who design the agents, interfaces, and platform integrations that enable seamless collaboration between researchers and AI. This role requires a deep understanding of applied AI and the ability to build scalable, performant systems.

Responsibilities

• Build, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of 8-10 engineers spanning full-stack, agent, and platform expertise.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, ownership, and continuous improvement; conduct performance reviews, provide feedback, and identify opportunities for growth.
• Manage team workload, prioritize projects, and ensure timely delivery of high-quality solutions.
• Define and execute the technical roadmap for LILA's application layer aligning with LILA's broader AI and product strategy.
• Drive innovation in how scientists interact with AI-driven systems.
• Own end-to-end delivery of the application platform — chat, agents, artifacts, and the integrations connecting them to lab workflows and ML pipelines — ensuring reliability, performance, and security across everything the team ships.
• Partner with ML researchers, scientists, product managers, and other engineering leaders to understand scientific workflows and translate them into product capabilities.
• Communicate technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences; manage expectations and ensure alignment across teams.
• Represent LILA's applied-AI work externally through conferences, presentations, and writing — helping attract top talent and establishing LILA's leadership at the intersection of AI and science.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 12+ years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale production systems, with 5+ years leading senior engineers.
• Track record of building and growing high-performing engineering teams in high-growth or early-stage environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long-term architecture.
• Deep technical judgment on Applied AI (agents, MCP, context engineering) and across the full stack (React, TypeScript, Python, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, AWS, Kubernetes).
• Hands-on experience — personally and on the teams you've led — using AI coding assistants and agentic tooling to drive productivity.
• Proven ability to define technical strategy, drive it to execution, and balance trade-offs between scalability, performance, delivery speed, and maintainability.
• Acute listening skills and a proven track record of partnering cross-functionally with scientists, ML engineers, product, and design; able to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping products built on AI agents, graph-based workflows, tool-use protocols (MCP), RAG pipelines, or LLM orchestration frameworks.
• AI-native product intuition: A point of view on what "good" looks like for chat, agent, and copilot experiences — and how to evolve it as the underlying models improve.
• Cloud & DevOps depth: Familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and CI/CD (GitHub Actions).
• Thought leadership in the applied-AI community via conference talks, blog posts, or open source.
• Scientific domain exposure: Experience with laboratory software, analytics for life sciences or material sciences, or adjacent scientific computing domains.

Skills

• Strong leadership and mentoring skills.
• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Experience with AI and machine learning technologies.
• Knowledge of cloud platforms and DevOps practices.
• Understanding of scientific workflows and domain-specific knowledge.

Benefits

• Competitive base compensation with bonus potential and early-stage equity.
• U.S. benefits: Medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer-paid life and disability insurance; flexible time off; paid parental leave; educational assistance program; commuter benefits; and a company subsidized lunch program.
• International benefits: Tailored benefits program based on location.

Pay

$204,000 USD - $306,000 USD

Schedule

Full-time