# Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval at Lila Sciences

- Company: Lila Sciences
- What the company does: LILA has created the world's first Operating System for Science powered by Scientific Superintelligence™. Backed by General Catalyst.
- Company website: https://www.lila.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Principal and up
- Location: San Francisco, CA USA
- Work setup: On-site
- Posted: 2026-10-26
- Apply by: 2026-12-10
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/lilasciences/jobs/4455692009?utm_source=1752vc&utm_medium=careers
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/lila-sciences-staff-principal-engineer-search-and-retrieval/

## About the role

Lila Sciences is building the infrastructure for autonomous science: AI systems that design experiments, run them in physical labs, and close the loop across life sciences, chemistry, and materials science. Our platform enables this to operate reliably at scale for external customers who require security, auditability, and operational rigor. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.

## What they're looking for

- 8+ years of software development experience, including production ownership of a search, retrieval, RAG, or knowledge graph system that real users depended on
- Production experience building semantic search: embedding models, vector indexes (HNSW/IVF), hybrid lexical and vector retrieval, and reranking. Graph database experience is a strong plus
- Track record in high-growth environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long-term architecture
- You can describe how you measured retrieval quality (recall, groundedness, citation accuracy) and how you caught regressions
- Hands-on coding in Python and modern backend frameworks (FastAPI, async Python)
- Modern cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS)

Tags: Software

Source: 1752vc Careers, https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/lila-sciences-staff-principal-engineer-search-and-retrieval/