Senior / Principal Chemist, AI Safety

About the role

Lila Sciences is building a talent-dense AI safety team to identify and mitigate risks from scientific superintelligence while retaining core scientific discovery capabilities. The team will develop bespoke safety strategies, conduct risk assessments, and implement safety systems for scientific models. This role focuses on mapping chemical misuse risks and connecting deep chemistry expertise with dual-use risk assessment to safeguard scientific AI.

Responsibilities

• Map chemical misuse risks across scientific models, agents and automated experimentation.
• Assess how scientific feasibility, practical complexity and actors' expertise affect the likelihood of misuse.
• Distinguish established capabilities, plausible future developments and weakly supported hypotheses.
• Identify gaps in coverage and frame questions for consultants and specialist organizations.
• Translate scientific risk judgments into dual-use policy boundaries and mitigation requirements.
• Partner with threat modelers, evaluation researchers and mitigation teams to design assessments and test safeguards.

Required skills

• Synthetic chemistry
• Molecular design
• Medicinal chemistry
• Inorganic chemistry
• Organometallic chemistry
• Process development
• Chemical dual-use risk assessment
• Scientific judgment
• Risk assessment

Nice to have

• AI safety
• Threat modeling
• Red-teaming
• Automated chemistry
• Scientific modeling

Qualifications

• PhD in synthetic chemistry or a closely related discipline
• Comparable experience in synthetic chemistry or a closely related discipline

About the Company

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence to solve humankind's greatest challenges. The company combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory instruments into an operating system for science that executes the scientific method autonomously.