Director/Senior Director, Molecular Discovery

<p><strong>Your Impact at LILA</strong></p> <p>The Director, Molecular Discovery is responsible for ensuring our autonomous science platform reliably and repeatedly delivers validated small-molecule drug candidates against designated targets at increasing speed. The platform generates and tests hypotheses at superhuman scale, and you ensure that process translates into real, high-quality compounds that advance toward the clinic.</p> <p>This role leans heavily into the AI and computational side of our workflow: you will be accountable for throughput, quality, and the operational health of the discovery engine, working hand-in-hand with AI scientists, computational chemists, and platform engineers to diagnose bottlenecks, close feedback loops, and continuously improve how the platform performs.</p> <p><strong>What You'll Be Building</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own small molecule discovery programs against assigned targets, from hit identification through lead optimization and candidate nomination.</li> <li>Serve as the accountable leader for discovery output setting and hitting timelines, quality benchmarks, and throughput targets across active programs.</li> <li>Operate as the primary interface between the autonomous science platform and drug discovery decision-making, ensuring that what the platform produces meets the bar for potency, selectivity, ADMET properties, and developability.</li> <li>Collaborate daily with AI/ML, robotics, and software engineering teams to close the loop between computational predictions and experimental results, driving continuous improvement of the platform's predictive accuracy and experimental efficiency.</li> <li>Architect the components of each discovery program end to end, specifying the required assays, building or sourcing the right capabilities, and managing the scientific staff needed to execute.