SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 148,000 - 208,000 / annual
Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence to solve major challenges through autonomous scientific discovery. They are establishing 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 risks across the organization's 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 pathways for dual-use concern.
• Assess how scientific feasibility, practical complexity, and actors' resources affect the plausibility 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 coverage gaps, frame questions for specialist consultants, and integrate their findings into comprehensive risk assessments.
• 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 assessments, interpret red-team findings, and test safeguards.
You will engage 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. The role involves technical safety strategy development, ecosystem engagement, safety-focused evaluations, and research into longer-term needs such as oversight of superintelligent scientific systems.
Lila combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory instruments into an operating system for science that executes the scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery across medicine, materials, and energy.
**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.
• Background in one or more of: molecular design and medicinal chemistry, inorganic and organometallic chemistry, synthesis, process development and formulations, or other relevant sub-fields.
• Substantive experience assessing chemical dual-use risks (e.g., national security, export controls, or chemical risk tracking such as the CWC).
• Strong scientific judgment about feasibility, uncertainty, and practical constraints, including ability to investigate unfamiliar questions and recognize limits of 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/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.
