Vice President, Engineering

What You'll Be Building

• Set the engineering roadmap for ASP Engineering, including objectives, risks, and platform priorities via collaboration with the Robotics, Software, Science, and Product teams.
• Define and drive a unified platform architecture across hardware, automation, and systems engineering, reducing one-off designs and enabling repeatable system deployment across sites.
• Establish system-level ownership of architecture, interfaces, and requirements to ensure consistent integration across all engineering domains.
• Create a culture of mentorship that supports execution of the roadmap while fostering career development of engineers.
• Partner with Robotics and Software to build, industrialize, and scale all-of-science autonomous labs with a focus on reliability, throughput, and quality.
• Integrate AI into the engineering lifecycle to bolster engineering speed and quality, decision making, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with Talent Acquisition to establish hiring practices that accelerate identification and onboarding of brilliant, culturally-aligned engineers.
• Partner with AI Research, Software, Product, and Science to align platform capabilities with scientific and commercial priorities.
• Develop and communicate clear prioritization frameworks across engineering initiatives; translate organizational feedback into actionable systems and process improvements.
• Represent Engineering with executive stakeholders and external partners; communicate tradeoffs, progress, and impact clearly.
• Partnering with external integrators, OEMs, and contractors to expand engineering capacity.

What You’ll Need to Succeed

• 15+ years building lab automation or relevant engineering systems.
• 10+ years leading managers and multi-disciplinary teams at scale.
• Proven track record scaling automated labs or manufacturing-like lab operations, including instrument and robot integration, scheduling and orchestration, reliability engineering, and capacity planning.
• Demonstrated experience integrating AI/ML into engineering, operations, and/or research environments.
• Experience building and standardizing complex engineering systems from early-stage, project-based environments into scalable, repeatable platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to balance rapid experimentation with the introduction of structure required for scale.
• Technical expertise across lab automation, controls/SCADA, and science instrumentation, including integration and co-development of robotics and software/data/compute platforms.
• Strong people and org leadership: recruiting and developing exceptional managers and ICs; building inclusive, high-ownership cultures that scale.
• Excellence in retaining cultural and technical excellence across multiple sites of lab automation innovation and build-outs.

Bonus Points For

• Multi-domain engineering excellence (mechanical, controls, electrical, systems) and cross-discipline engineering fluency (robotics, software, computer).
• Experience defining interface standards across hardware, robotics, and software systems.
• Experience standing up lifecycle management (e.g., PLM-lite, change control, commissioning frameworks) in fast-moving environments.
• Multi-domain science fluency (materials science, chemistry, life science).
• 10+ years experience integrating LIMS, orchestration, schedulers, and reliability and observability pipelines in lab automation.
• Experience managing stage-gate transitions from R&D to scaled operations across multiple sites.

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.

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.