Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI

Your Impact at LILA

We are growing our Applied AI org and seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI with deep expertise in model post-training, evaluation, and production-oriented ML systems. You’ll shape how Lila’s AI models are adapted to customer-specific scientific needs, with a focus on turning frontier model capabilities into reliable workflows that can be evaluated, iterated and used in real customer contexts.

Applied AI sits at the intersection of AI Research, model engineering, and product deployment. The team partners closely with AI Researchers and Software teams to adapt Lila models to customer workflows, improve model quality through post training and driving how harness engineering shapes model behavior inside the product.

This is a high-impact senior IC role for someone who brings deep, hands-on expertise in model post-training, evaluation, and production ML systems, built over many years of solving this exact class of problem.

What You'll Be Building

• Apply deep, hands-on expertise to close the last-mile gap between Lila's model capabilities and customer-specific scientific workflows.
• Lead post-training efforts using approaches such as SFT and RL (DPO, PPO/GRPO) to align model behavior with customer-specific requirements and feedback.
• Build and run evaluation loops that measure model quality, reliability, and customer fit, using patterns you've refined across many prior projects.
• Turn customer learnings, data signals, and evaluation results into concrete model improvement cycles.
• Partner with AI researchers to translate model a