Senior Director / Vice President, Chemistry Experiment

The Head of Chemistry will lead Lila’s chemistry organization, establishing the strategic direction and team leadership that enables Chemistry to drive impact across all of Lila’s discovery and platform efforts. This leader will build an experimental chemistry function spanning organic and inorganic chemistry, molecules and nanoparticles, discovery and process chemistry, synthetic and analytical methods, and target technologies spanning medicines to industrial chemistry.

The Head of Chemistry will lead Lila’s experimental chemistry strategy in conjunction with senior advisors and will work closely with Lila’s Product, AI, and Engineering leadership to establish AI-informing and AI-driven experimentation to address humankind’s greatest challenges. The successful candidate will cultivate the culture and scientific rigor that define excellence in chemistry at Lila and scale the Chemistry team to tackle the breadth of opportunities afforded by Lila’s development of scientific superintelligence.

The Head of Chemistry will report directly to the Chief Autonomous Science Officer, expanding Lila’s team of science, engineering, and business leaders.

• PhD in Chemistry or a closely related discipline with 12+ years of experience in chemistry research
• Demonstrated excellence building and leading high-performing chemistry teams, including hiring, mentoring, and developing scientists across multiple levels.
• Deep expertise in molecular chemistry: synthetic organic/inorganic and nanochemistry, retrosynthesis, route design, and practical execution of complex multistep syntheses.
• Experience in process chemistry, formulation development, and analytical chemistry.
• Ability to evaluate synthetic feasibility alongside innovation potential to prioritize molecules and chemical series effectively.
• Experience defining chemistry strategy and priorities with a passion for cross-functional collaboration
• Experience working effectively in highly interdisciplinary environments spanning chemistry, materials science, biology, automation, and computational sciences.
• Track record of scientific leadership, program delivery, and translating discoveries to commercializable solutions.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; ability to translate chemistry depth into strategic clarity for diverse audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to build inclusive, high-trust team cultures that attract and retain top talent in competitive chemistry markets.

Bonus Points For

• Experience working in AI-enabled discovery environments or integrating computational design and machine learning insights into chemistry workflows.
• Experience building and scaling automated, robotics-enabled, or high-throughput chemistry platforms for molecular synthesis and optimization.
• Experience translating chemistry needs into platform requirements, including instrumentation selection, workflow design, and integration with automated systems.
• Broad understanding of molecular design principles across therapeutics and other small-molecule innovation areas.
• Experience operating in fast-paced, technology-driven environments where scientific creativity, speed, and cross-functional execution are critical.
• Prior leadership experience at a growth-stage chemistry, biotech, or other deep-tech company.

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.