Director, Enterprise Platform

You will drive core enterprise capabilities to production: multi-tenancy and tenant isolation, SSO/SAML integration, role-based access control (RBAC), a tenant admin console, metering and billing infrastructure, audit logging, etc. You will push the frontier - building agentic AI-powered systems for self-service tenant data migrations, intelligent customer observability, automated compliance workflows, Lila SDK, MCP, and AI-native external APIs that let customers and third-party agents interact programmatically with Lila’s platform.

This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role. We move fast, ship weekly, and expect leaders who thrive in ambiguity - not ones who wait for requirements to be handed to them. You will own outcomes.

What You’ll Be Building

• Team Leadership: Recruit, develop, and lead a high-performing team of software engineers building enterprise platform systems. Foster a bias-for-action culture: ship iteratively, make reversible decisions quickly, and optimize for learning speed over perfection. Provide technical guidance and mentorship, promoting professional growth. Grow engineers into company-wide technical leaders.
• Technical Strategy & Execution: Define and execute the technical roadmap for enterprise platform capabilities spanning multi-tenancy, SSO, RBAC, tenant admin console, metering, billing, auditability, data protection, customer observability, product and customer analytics, external APIs, SDK, and tenant data migrations. Translate strategy into quarterly execution plans with measurable targets. Define roadmaps that balance new product development, quality improvements, and operational maintenance. Drive adoption of agentic AI patterns to automate and accelerate enterprise workflows.
• Stakeholder Management: Partner with product, design, security, sales, and customer success teams to define requirements and prioritize the enterprise roadmap. Engage directly with enterprise customers to understand their needs around security, compliance, and scale. Communicate technical concepts and trade-offs effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences. Manage expectations and ensure alignment across teams.
• Engineering Quality & Reliability: Maintain high product quality standards throughout execution. Ensure the reliability, availability, and security of enterprise-critical infrastructure. Architect for 10x growth - design systems that handle order-of-magnitude increases in tenant count, API volume, and data scope without re-platforming.
• Engineering Productivity: Drive innovative, agentic AI-powered solutions for self-service enterprise operations - tenant provisioning, data migrations, compliance reporting, and customer-facing analytics. Build developer experience as a first-class product concern.
• Organizational Impact: Contribute to engineering-wide organizational improvements. Represent Lila’s enterprise platform work externally at conferences and in blog posts.

• 12+ years of software development experience, with a focus on Enterprise SaaS product development. 5+ years of experience leading senior engineers.
• Deep expertise in enterprise SaaS platform systems: authentication/authorization (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML), multi-tenancy, RBAC, billing/metering, configurations, SDK and APIs.
• Experience with modern cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS/GCP) and event-driven systems.
• Experience building platform/infrastructure teams that serve external users.
• Comfort operating as a player-coach - willing to get hands dirty in code, debug production issues, and prototype alongside your team.
• Track record building enterprise platforms in high-growth environments where speed-to-value mattered as much as long-term architecture.
• Hands-on coding in Python and modern backend frameworks (FastAPI, async Python). Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and containerized deployments.
• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field of study.

Bonus Points For

• Experience building a team from ground up.
• Familiarity with agentic AI patterns - LLM-powered automation, tool-use architectures, and AI-native developer tooling.
• Experience with compliance frameworks: SOC 2, HIPAA, GxP, FedRAMP, or ALCOA+.
• Built self-service enterprise products where developer and admin experience was a first-class concern.
• Operated enterprise SaaS platforms serving 1000+ tenants with strict SLA, audit, and data isolation requirements.

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.