Principal Scientist / Associate Director, Soft Materials Experimentation

About the role

Your Impact at LILA Lila is hiring a Scientific Leader to build and run our experimental soft materials team, covering formulations, polymers, colloids, gels, emulsions, inks, adhesives, and coatings. You will take on a group of four scientists and grow it as the portfolio expands across formulation, rheological and scattering characterization, and polymer processing. The team turns soft-matter problems into closed-loop autonomous workflows: defining what gets measured, how it gets measured at throughput, and how the resulting data supports active learning and inverse design. The work asks you to stay close to the bench while mentoring a growing team and setting its direction over a multi-year growth horizon.

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. LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai. Guided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a group of scientists spanning formulation, polymer processing, and physical characterization; set scientific direction, develop the team, and hire against an expanding portfolio
• Own the experimental strategy for soft materials — the measurement stack, the campaign designs, and the scientific validity of what the group publishes internally and to partners
• Hold your team's delivery on partner-funded programs alongside the technical program managers who own the programs themselves, setting the standard on timelines, throughput, and data quality
• Build and validate high-throughput workflows spanning melt and solution rheology, scattering, thermal and mechanical analysis, microfluidics, and application-specific performance testing
• Define the measurement strategies that make machine learning and inverse design tractable, and partner with modeling and AI colleagues to close the loop from proposed candidate to validated formulation
• Work with automation and engineering colleagues to move prototype workflows into production with reliable instrument control, structured data capture, and end-to-end robotics
• Provide technical depth on new opportunities: feasibility assessment, scoping, and customer-facing scientific engagement
• Justify and manage capital equipment and vendor relationships for the group; set the expectation on safe handling for its chemical footprint and hold the group to it
• Coordinate shared characterization capability and cross-domain campaigns with adjacent materials and chemistry groups

Requirements

• PhD in Materials Science, Polymer Science, Chemical Engineering, or Chemistry with 8+ years of post-degree R&D experience, or equivalent depth built through industrial practice
• Experience leading scientific teams, whether as a formal manager or as a technical lead with direct responsibility for others