Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, Life Sciences

About the role

Your Impact at LILA

We're seeking extraordinarily talented Forward Deployed Engineers to join our growing team. Our FDEs are high-performing generalists with a broad set of skills across scientific domains and software engineering, in addition to depth in one or more focus areas.

As an FDE, you'll embed directly within our internal and external customer facing biotech and science teams, living their problems and rapidly ideating, building, and deploying solutions that transform their capabilities across the Lila platform. You'll leverage our AI and software platform tools while developing custom features that address each customer's unique challenges. This isn't traditional software development—it's high-velocity, AI-fueled, high-impact engineering where you'll ship production code in days, not months.

What You'll Be Building

- Developing, wrapping, and adapting domain-specific tools for molecular modeling, data analysis, process optimization, and more.

- Deploying custom agentic scientific workflows that integrate with industrial instruments (PLCs, control software) and data systems (ERP, MES, SCADA).

- Building real-time data pipelines that transform scientific data into actionable insights.

- Creating intuitive interfaces that make complex AI/ML capabilities accessible to scientists.

What You'll Need to Succeed

- Background in biology, molecular science, or related scientific field.

- Ability to communicate effectively with external partners and internal product and technical leaders.

- Experience with data engineering, ETL pipelines, and working with complex datasets.

- Strong full-stack development skills with the ability to work across backend, frontend, and data layers.

- Exceptional problem-solving abilities and comfort with ambiguous requirements.

- Knack for product discovery and an ability to pass well-defined customer requirements back to the product teams.

- Willingness to travel to customer sites for engineering deployments.

Bonus Points For

- Previous customer-facing or consulting experience.

- Depth in controls engineering and machine learning.

- Experience with scientific computing libraries (NumPy, Pandas, SciPy, RDKit).

- Familiarity with ML/AI implementation and deployment.

- Familiarity with modern web technologies (TypeScript, React)

What Makes a Great FDE

- Customer Obsessed: You're energized by understanding customer problems deeply and seeing your solutions drive real impact.

- Fast Learner: You quickly grasp new scientific domains and translate complex requirements into elegant solutions.

- Autonomous: You thrive with minimal supervision and take extreme ownership of customer success.

- Collaborative: You work seamlessly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.