# Associate Director/Director, Inference Engineering at Lila Sciences

- Company: Lila Sciences
- Status: Open
- Workplace: On-site
- Location: Cambridge, MA USA; San Francisco, CA USA
- Level: Principal
- Discipline: AI & ML
- Employment: Full-time
- Salary: $204K–348K
- Posted: 2026-10-26
- Skills: inference APIs, serving frameworks, request routing
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/lilasciences/jobs/4459902009

## Description

Your Impact at LILA 
 Lila is hiring an Associate Director/Director, Inference Engineering to lead the team responsible for Lila's model serving platform: the inference APIs, serving frameworks, request routing, batching strategies, and deployment systems that bring models reliably to production.
 You will define how Lila serves models at scale, balancing latency, throughput, quality, and cost, and act as the technical authority connecting research and ML to production-grade serving capabilities. The work spans people leadership, service ownership, cross-functional partnership, and deep technical judgment in modern LLM serving.
 What You'll Be Building 
• Own the inference service end to end: API contracts, latency SLAs, throughput guarantees, rate limits
• Drive serving architecture decisions: batching, KV cache, speculative decoding, quantization, multi-node deployment
• Establish SLOs for latency, throughput, and availability, plus on-call and postmortem practices
• Partner with ML, research, and product engineering to make new models production-ready
• Build systems for model onboarding, deployment safety, evaluation gates, and observability
• Build, mentor, and retain a high-performing engineering team, and own the serving roadmap
 What You'll Need to Succeed 
• Deep understanding of the inference stack for large language models, including serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, TGI), batching strategies, memory constraints, and latency/throughput tradeoffs
• Experience owning a customer- or product-facing API service end to end, including SLAs, incident response

More Lila Sciences roles: https://deviantjobs.com/companies/lila-sciences