Co-Op, Structuring Scientific Data for Discovery

Location: Cambridge, MA USA; San Francisco, CA USA Department: Physical Sciences AI

Your Impact at LILA

Lila Sciences builds AI systems that accelerate discovery across the physical and life sciences. Our team turns unstructured scientific knowledge, including literature, patents, and technical reports, into structured signals that power downstream Lila applications.

As a Data Extraction Co-Op, you will work alongside research scientists and engineers on a focused sub-problem in this stack. You will fine-tune and evaluate models for scientific knowledge extraction and retrieval, build pipelines for messy real-world data, and ship work that flows into production systems.

What You'll Be Building

Fine-tune and evaluate language, multimodal, or specialized models for scientific data extraction

Build retrieval and RAG pipelines surfacing relevant documents, tables, and figures

Generate and validate structured datasets extracted from scientific literature and patents

Run end-to-end pipelines and analyze results against clear evaluation criteria

Document findings and present them to the team

Contribute to a publication or open-source project where the work supports it

What You'll Need to Succeed

Pursuing a Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in CS, chemistry, materials science, physics, biology, or chemical engineering

Solid foundation in machine learning fundamentals and Python

Familiarity with NLP or computer vision concepts

Curiosity about scientific data and willingness to learn quickly in a research setting

Clear written and verbal communication

Bonus Points For

Coursework or projects involving multimodal models or document understanding (OCR, table and figure extraction)

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

Experience building evaluation sets or annotation workflows

Experience working with messy real-world data

Interest in scientific document parsing

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.