Lila Sciences
Machine Learning Scientist I / II, Protein Design
$176K–$304K
San Francisco, CA USA +1 · Full-time · Posted Sep 15, 2026
- Location
- San Francisco, CA USA
San Francisco, CA - Education
- MS or PhD in computer science, machine learning, computational biology, biophysics, bioengineering, or a similar quantitative field.
About the job
Design protein molecules for active biologics programs and build machine-learning workflows and evaluation systems that generalize across programs.
What you'll do
- Design molecules with domain scientists, translating biological and experimental constraints into design hypotheses.
- Develop drug-discovery reasoning capabilities and orchestrate design workflows.
- Build benchmarks and evaluation infrastructure, and maintain workflow reproducibility, throughput, and inference-cost performance.
What they ask for
- MS or PhD in a listed quantitative field or a similar quantitative field.
- Strong software engineering and system design fundamentals.
- Rigor in evaluation and dataset design.
- Strong cross-functional communication skills and domain expertise in protein sequence, structure, and function.
Nice to have
- Experience building reasoning models, agents, planning systems, or multi-step ML orchestration.
- Experience designing therapeutic proteins, developing evaluation tools, training or serving models at scale, or producing AI for Science research outputs.
Pay
$176,000 — $304,000 USD (base salary)
AI focus
Apply machine learning and reasoning systems to protein and biologics design, drug-discovery workflow orchestration, and evaluation of generalizable design decisions.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative