Sr Principal/Principal Software Engineer, App

Sr Principal/Principal Software Engineer, App Your Impact at LILA We're hiring Sr Principal / Principal Software Engineers to design the agents, interfaces, and platform integrations that let researchers seamlessly collaborate with AI. What You'll Be Building • Design & Build UI and APIs: Design and build high-performance, secure, and well-documented UI and APIs that integrate with AI-driven applications. • Database Architecture & Scaling: Develop schemas and manage diverse data systems (SQL, NoSQL, Vector DBs, and others) for optimal performance and scalability. • Application Development: Drive the implementation of front-end and backend services, focusing on performance, maintainability, and reliability. • Performance & Reliability: Diagnose and optimize system bottlenecks, ensuring high availability and low-latency performance across large-scale workloads. • Cloud & Infrastructure: Leverage AWS services, Kubernetes and modern DevOps practices to build and deploy production-grade systems at scale. • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with ML researchers, engineers, and scientists to integrate data pipelines, APIs, and cloud infrastructure into scientific workflows. What You'll Need To Succeed • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field. • 8-15 years of engineering experience building and deploying large-scale systems in production. You must be strong in either front-end or backend. • Full Stack Development: Experience developing web apps across the full stack (React, TypeScript, Monorepos like Nx, TailWind, FastAPI, SQL/NoSQL, Python, Pydantic) • Hands on experience using AI coding assistants to drive productivity is required. • Communication & Collaboration: Acute listening skills, and a proven track record of working cross-functionally with scientists, data engineers, and product teams; able to explain complex ideas to diverse audiences. • Problem Solving: Proven ability to take ownership of complex backend challenges, balancing trade-offs between scalability, performance, and maintainability. Bonus Points For • Applied AI Engineering: Experience building with AI agents, graph-based workflows, tool-use protocols (MCP), RAG pipelines, or LLM orchestration frameworks. • Cloud & DevOps Knowledge: Hands-on experience with AWS; strong understanding of Kubernetes and containerization, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions). • Experience with ORMs: Experience with and web services for CRUD services (SQLModel, FastAPI, Django). • Orchestration Systems: Experience with orchestrators tools (Airflow, Prefect, Temporal, Dagster). • Familiarity with Python for Science: Familiarity with data science and ML libraries (pandas, numpy, scipy, jax, pytorch). • Domain Background: Exposure to laboratory software or analytics for life sciences, material sciences, or related fields. • Experience with laboratory devices, robotics, or hardware drivers. 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 $204,000-$348,000 USD