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Salary: USD 148,000 - 208,000 / annual
Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence to solve major scientific challenges through advanced AI models and proprietary AI Science Factory instruments. The company is assembling a talent-dense AI safety team to identify and mitigate risks from scientific superintelligence while preserving core scientific discovery capabilities.
You will serve as a Senior Chemist focused on AI safety, mapping chemical misuse risks across scientific models, agents, and automated experimentation systems. Your core responsibilities include:
• Map chemical misuse risks across scientific models and automated systems, connecting scientific advances to harmful applications and identifying emerging or overlooked pathways for dual-use concerns.
• Assess how scientific feasibility, practical complexity, and actors' expertise or resources affect the plausibility and likelihood of misuse, including which constraints AI could change.
• Distinguish established capabilities from plausible future developments and weakly supported hypotheses, updating assessments as scientific evidence and AI capabilities evolve.
• Identify gaps in risk coverage, frame questions for external consultants and specialist organizations, and assess and integrate their findings.
• Translate scientific risk judgments into dual-use policy boundaries, evaluation priorities, and mitigation requirements that preserve beneficial chemistry.
• Partner with threat modelers, evaluation researchers, and mitigation teams to design informative assessments, interpret red-team findings, and test safeguards.
This is a hybrid role with offices in Cambridge, MA; London, UK; and San Francisco, CA. You will work across all core teams within the organization—science, model training, lab integration—to build and implement a bespoke safety strategy tailored to Lila's specific goals and deployment strategies.
**Requirements:**
• PhD or comparable experience in synthetic chemistry or closely related discipline, demonstrated through substantial research or applied work and sound interpretation of experimental evidence. Relevant sub-fields include molecular design, medicinal chemistry, inorganic and organometallic chemistry, synthesis, process development, formulations, or other related areas.
• Substantive experience assessing chemical dual-use risks (e.g., across national security, export controls, or chemical risk tracking such as the CWC).
• Strong scientific judgment about feasibility, uncertainty, and practical constraints, including the ability to investigate unfamiliar questions and recognize the limits of your expertise.
• Ability to identify appropriate specialists, critically assess their evidence, and combine findings across disciplines into defensible risk assessments.
• Clear scientific communication, independent research judgment, and ability to collaborate across science, engineering, and policy.
**Bonus qualifications:**
• Prior experience applying domain expertise to AI safety through scientific analysis informing threat models, evaluation or red-teaming work, or mitigation design.
• Experience commissioning specialist research or coordinating external scientific collaborators.
• Experience with automated chemistry, scientific modeling, or translation of computational findings into physical experiments.
