Senior / Principal Materials Scientist, AI Safety

Your Impact at LILA

We're building a talent-dense, high-agency AI safety team at Lila that will engage all core teams within the organization (science, model training, lab integration, etc.), to identify and mitigate risks from scientific superintelligence while retaining the core scientific discovery capabilities of the stack. The initial focus of this team will be to build and implement a bespoke safety strategy for Lila, tailored to its specific goals and deployment strategies. This will involve technical safety strategy development, broader ecosystem engagement, safety-focused evaluations, safety systems to mitigate risks, and a research agenda that explores longer-term needs such as oversight of superintelligent scientific systems.

We are seeking a materials scientist to map risk across the material sciences domain: you will connect deep materials expertise with dual-use risk assessment to help safeguard increasingly capable scientific AI. You will investigate how advances in materials research could change harmful capabilities, including established and emerging threats.

What You'll Be Building

• Map misuse risks by connecting material properties, processing and functional performance (across a range of materials domains) to harmful applications, including emerging or overlooked uses of scientific advances.
• Assess how physical feasibility, processing complexity, manufacturing requirements and actors' resources affect the plausibility and likelihood of misuse, including which constraints AI could change.
• Distinguish established capabilities, plausible future developments and weakly supported hypotheses, revising assessments as evidence changes across models, tools and automated laboratories.
• Identify gaps in expertise, commission targeted scientific input with the expert-program team, and integrate specialist findings into a coherent assessment of the risk landscape.
• Translate dual-use judgments into policy boundaries, evaluation priorities and mitigation requirements that support beneficial materials research.
• Work with threat modelers, evaluation researchers and engineering and experimental colleagues to assess capabilities, interpret red-team findings and evaluate safeguards.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• Deep expertise (a PhD, or comparable experience) in materials science or a closely related discipline, with a strong grasp of the relationships between structure, properties, processing and applications. Relevant backgrounds include particulate, porous and formulated systems; and structural and functional materials, including thin films, electrochemical materials and metals and alloys.
• Substantive experience assessing dual-use risks in a relevant area, with a strong understanding of harmful applications such as nuclear proliferation, radiological misuse, weapons-related capabilities (e.g. energetics) or other consequential materials risks.
• Sound judgment about physical possibility, practical feasibility and uncertainty, together with the ability to investigate risks beyond your immediate specialism.
• The ability to identify appropriate specialists, evaluate technical evidence and synthesize contributions across scientific and security disciplines.
• Clear scientific communication, independent research judgment and an ability to collaborate across science, engineering and policy.

Bonus Points For

• Prior experience applying materials or related physical-science expertise to AI safety through one or more of: threat analysis, evaluations or red teaming, or mitigation design.
• Experience commissioning specialist research or assessing emerging technologies across disciplinary boundaries.
• Experience with computational materials science, advanced manufacturing or automated synthesis and characterization.

About LILA

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.

We’re All In

Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

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A Note to Agencies

Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.