Principal Engineer, Software (Enterprise Platform)

About the role

Lila Sciences is building the infrastructure for autonomous science — AI systems that design experiments, run them in physical labs, and close the loop across life sciences, chemistry, and materials science. Our platform enables this to operate reliably at scale for external customers who require security, auditability, and operational rigor.

What You'll Be Building

• Design and evolve the core identity systems powering Lila’s enterprise platform — organizations, groups, roles, SCIM provisioning, seat lifecycle management, and fine-grained authorization across experiments, datasets, models, and scientific workflows. You’ll define how tenant isolation, policy evaluation, and access governance work across the platform.
• Design tenant-aware schemas, metadata systems, and platform primitives that support highly heterogeneous scientific data across life sciences and materials science workloads. Drive architectural decisions around scalability, reliability, retention, and operational correctness.
• Arcitect systems for tenant provisioning, usage metering, billing, data migrations, compliance workflows, and operational automation. Push toward self-service and agentic operational workflows that reduce manual intervention while maintaining strong safety guarantees.
• Operate as a senior technical leader across platform engineering, infrastructure, security, AI/ML, and scientific application teams. This is a hands-on Principal Engineer role with broad architectural influence, high autonomy, and direct ownership of critical platform systems.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• 12+ years of software development experience, with a focus on Enterprise SaaS product development
• Deep expertise in enterprise SaaS platform systems: authentication/authorization (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML), multi-tenancy, RBAC, billing/metering, configurations, SDK and APIs
• Experience with modern cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS/GCP) and event-driven systems, familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and containerized deployments
• Track record building enterprise platforms in high-growth environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long-term architecture
• Strong cross-functional communication skills and the ability to influence architecture across teams.
• Hands-on coding in Python and modern backend frameworks (FastAPI, async Python)
• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field of study

Bonus Points For

• You have practical experience with agentic systems and workflow automation where models take actions with real operational consequences in regulated environments.
• You’ve worked on platforms serving scientific or laboratory data such as LIMS, ELN, bioinformatics, or related systems, and understand the provenance and traceability requirements associated with scientific workflows.
• You’ve built self-service enterprise tooling for non-technical administrators and have thought carefully about the UX and API design required to make those systems usable.
• You’ve experience with compliance frameworks: SOC 2, HIPAA, GxP, FedRAMP, or ALCOA+
• You’ve operated multi-tenant SaaS systems at significant scale with strict isolation, reliability, and compliance requirements.

Compensation

We offer competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity. Your final offer will reflect your background, expertise, and expected impact.

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.

U.S. Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Employer-paid life and disability insurance
• Flexible time off with generous company wide holidays
• Paid parental leave
• An educational assistance program
• Commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office based employees
• A company subsidized lunch program

International Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits program tailored to your region
• USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market

Expected Base Salary Range

$204,000 - $310,000 USD