The Staff/Principal DevOps Engineer will drive the design, implementation, and optimization of our infrastructure and delivery platforms. This role bridges platform engineering, site reliability, and DevOps practices, building scalable, automated systems that enable fast, reliable software delivery across cloud and Kubernetes environments. You will collaborate with software engineers, lab scientists, and ML engineers to build infrastructure that powers automated scientific analysis, experiment orchestration, and more. What You'll Be Building
Build Kubernetes-based systems supporting scientific services, ML pipelines, and platform workloads; including production hardening, RBAC, network policies, and Pod Security Standards
CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions/GitLab CI implementing best practices: build attestations, SBOM generation, dependency scanning, and container image hardening
Infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and Helm; policy-as-code guardrails (OPA/Kyverno/Checkov) with drift detection
AWS cloud infrastructure: EKS clusters, IAM least privilege, VPC/PrivateLink networking, KMS/Secrets Manager, ECR, S3, and centralized logging/monitoring
Platform tooling to streamline deployment, observability, and developer workflows, enabling self-service with secure defaults
Reliability engineering: SLOs/SLIs, incident response, capacity planning, and performance optimization throughout the stack
QA and testing infrastructure: static analysis and code quality gate enforcement in CI pipelines, automated end-to-end and browser-based regression test suites, ephemeral test environments for PR-based validation, and pre-merge quality checks
Automation and tooling in Python or Go to improve infrastructure operations and integrate telemetry with observability platforms
What You’ll Need to Succeed
Expertise in DevOps, SRE, Systems Engineering, or Platform Engineering in large scale cloud environments
Expertise in deploying to cloud environments (AWS, GCP, etc) using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm) and containerization
Deep experience with CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins) and GitOps practices
Strong proficiency in Python/scripting languages for automation and tooling
Strong understanding of Kubernetes operations: deployments, networking, storage, observability, and troubleshooting
Administering static analysis platforms (custom quality profiles, security hotspot triage) and scaling browser-based test suites across parallel CI environments
Prior startup/high-growth experience balancing velocity with reliability
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. Expected Base Salary Range
$192,000—$272,000 USD
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. 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.
