Co-op, Software, Applied AI Platform Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA USA Department: Software

Your Impact at LILA

Lila Sciences builds AI systems that accelerate discovery across the physical and life sciences. The Platform Engineering team owns the core infrastructure and developer-facing services that power Lila's AI Science Factory™ — including APIs, data pipelines, and the agentic systems that orchestrate scientific workflows at scale.

This co-op has two focus tracks. Candidates may be matched to one or both based on interest and fit:

Track 1 — Data Platform: Build pipelines and services that structure scientific knowledge (literature, patents, lab data) into signals that power Lila's AI models and applications.

Track 2 — Agentic SSR (AI and Server-Side Rendering): Build the server-rendered, agentic layer of the Lila Platform — the infrastructure that enables AI agents to compose and serve dynamic scientific interfaces at runtime.

In either track, you will ship production code, work alongside research scientists and ML engineers, and contribute to a platform that runs real scientific experiments.

What You'll Be Building

Data Platform Track

Build and maintain ingestion and transformation pipelines for scientific literature, patents, and lab-generated data

Implement structured data extraction workflows, including schema design, validation, and quality evaluation

Integrate retrieval and RAG pipelines that surface relevant documents, tables, and figures to downstream Lila applications

Generate and validate structured datasets; run end-to-end pipelines and analyze results against clear evaluation criteria

Collaborate with research scientists to translate scientific domain requirements into robust data models

Document findings and present results to the team; contribute to a publication or open-source project where the work supports it

Agentic SSR Track

Build server-side rendering services and APIs that enable AI agents to compose and deliver dynamic scientific interfaces

Implement agentic workflow primitives: task routing, context management, streaming responses, and tool integration

Develop platform features end-to-end: schema design, business logic, API surface, and automated tests

Instrument code for observability; participate in debugging and root-cause analysis of production issues

Improve developer experience through internal tooling, reusable libraries, and documentation

Contribute to technical design discussions and code reviews

What You'll Need to Succeed

Pursuing a Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field

Strong foundation in software engineering fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, and system design

Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript

Experience building or consuming REST or GraphQL APIs

Familiarity with relational databases and SQL

Ability to work independently, take ownership of tasks, and communicate progress clearly

Curiosity about scientific data or AI-driven software systems and a willingness to learn quickly

Bonus Points For

Familiarity with NLP, document understanding (OCR, table/figure extraction), or multimodal models

Experience with LLM applications, embeddings, or retrieval systems (chunking, reranking, vector search)

Experience building evaluation sets, annotation workflows, or working with messy real-world data

Interest in scientific document parsing or knowledge graph construction

Experience with server-side rendering frameworks (Next.js, Remix, or similar)

Exposure to LLM APIs, agentic frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, or similar), or AI-assisted developer tooling

Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) or containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes)

Familiarity with event-driven architectures or message queues (Kafka, Pub/Sub, SQS)

Both Tracks

Experience contributing to or maintaining open-source projects

Prior internship or co-op experience in a software engineering role

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.

We’re All In

Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

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.