Senior II/ Staff Software Engineer, Platform Operations
Lila Sciences
$180,000 - $280,000 / year
Need a reasonable accommodation to apply or interview? Contact us.
JobMinglr uses automated technology to recommend jobs based on profile information and job preferences. Match Score does not determine eligibility for a position, prevent a user from viewing or applying to a job, or make hiring decisions on behalf of an employer.
Description
Your Impact at LILA
The Senior II/ Staff Software Engineer, Platform Operations will design, build, and operate the software applications, services, and systems that support Lila’s product and delivery platforms. This role is for a strong software developer who is comfortable working close to infrastructure, reliability, CI/CD, and cloud systems.
You will build production software across application services, internal tools, automation systems, deployment workflows, and reliability platforms. The right person brings strong software engineering fundamentals, product-minded execution, and the ability to use agentic coding tools to raise quality, increase delivery speed, and produce results beyond conventional software development approaches.
This role works closely with software engineers, ML engineers, and scientific teams to support platform operations, inference workloads, experiment orchestration, and application security. It is best suited for someone who wants to build durable software systems while improving how those systems are designed, deployed, monitored, and operated.
What You'll Be Building
- Design and build production applications, services, and internal tools for Platform Operations.
- Develop backend services, APIs, automation systems, and workflow integrations.
- Use agentic coding tools to accelerate delivery while improving code quality and test coverage.
- Build deployment and release workflows that make software delivery faster and safer.
- Improve reliability, observability, and operational readiness across software systems.
- Partner with infrastructure and platform teams on Kubernetes, AWS, CI/CD, and security.
- Create developer-friendly tooling that helps engineering teams ship and operate services.
- Debug complex issues across application code, infrastructure, and production environments.
- Apply sound software design practices to systems that need to scale and evolve.
What You’ll Need to Succeed
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building production applications, services, or systems.
- Strong backend development skills in Python, TypeScript, Go, or similar languages.
- Experience designing APIs, services, automation workflows, and internal developer tools.
- Practical experience using agentic coding tools to improve engineering quality and output.
- Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and deployment systems.
- Strong debugging skills across application code, distributed systems, and production environments.
- Ability to design maintainable systems with clear interfaces, observability, and secure defaults.
- Strong communication skills and a track record of cross-functional engineering collaboration.
Bonus Points For
- Experience building platform, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure-adjacent software systems.
- Familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
- Experience improving observability, deployment safety, incident response, or operational tooling.
- Background with security-minded software delivery, including secrets, access controls, scanning, or supply chain practices.
- Experience using AI or agentic development workflows for testing, refactoring, documentation, or delivery automation.
- Experience supporting ML, inference, scientific, or data-intensive workloads
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.
U.S. Benefits. Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including 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; and a company subsidized lunch program.
International Benefits. Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market.
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. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.
We’re All In
Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.
Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.
A Note to Agencies
Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.
Benefits
- health insurance
- vision insurance
- stock options
- parental leave
- disability insurance
About this role
Lila Sciences is seeking a Staff DevOps Engineer to architect and operate the infrastructure backbone for an AI-driven scientific discovery platform. You'll design Kubernetes systems, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud infrastructure on AWS that support automated scientific analysis, ML workloads, and experiment orchestration. The role demands hands-on expertise across containerization, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Helm), GitHub Actions or GitLab CI, and Python automation—with a particular focus on supply chain security, policy-as-code enforcement, and reliability engineering practices like SLOs and incident response.
This is a high-impact position at a startup tackling fundamental scientific challenges. You'll collaborate directly with software engineers, scientists, and ML teams to build self-service platforms that balance velocity with production hardening. Experience in large-scale cloud environments, Kubernetes operations, and DevOps or SRE practices is essential. Bonus qualifications include familiarity with securing ML pipelines, regulated environments (SOC 2, ISO 27001), chaos engineering, and startup-scale growth dynamics. The role is based in Cambridge and requires in-office presence, with compensation ranging from $192,000 to $272,000 plus equity and comprehensive benefits.
How this employer is doing
solid
- H1B: Sponsors Visas
- Recently Raised Funding
- Sponsors Visas
In the news
Lila Sciences in talks for $2B funding at $8.5B valuation - Bloomberg, Investing.com
This role's local market on JobMinglr
Pay for this role
$180,000 to $280,000 per year
That is the employer's posted range, and where you land in it is usually decided in one conversation. Before that conversation, run the numbers: analyze an offer for this role.
Before you apply, worth reading
How JobMinglr reads this job
Every listing here is scored against your profile before you apply: skills overlap, experience level, location and work arrangement, each weighted and explained. You see the score and the reasons, not just a list. How the matching works.