The role focuses on securing multi-tenant access controls, managing tenant lifecycles, delivering public APIs, and integrating MCPs and agents to support internal scientists and external developers with a high degree of autonomy.
Role Details
Location: San Francisco, CA (onsite). Compensation: USD 180,000 - 256,000 per year.
Responsibilities
- Multi-Tenancy and Authorization: design secure tenant isolation, authentication, authorization, and auditing across customer organizations. Define access boundaries and isolation guarantees required for enterprise and regulated deployments (GxP, FedRAMP). Develop resilient backend services in Python with FastAPI. Own multi-tenant data schema design, tenant-aware query patterns, and maintain operational correctness in regulated environments.
- Tenant Self-Serve and Lifecycle: build services for tenant provisioning, self-service administration, and the onboarding lifecycle. Support billing, pricing, and metering surfaces for enterprise customers.
- Public and Agent-Facing APIs: own and evolve public APIs (REST, streaming, asynchronous) for both human developers and autonomous agents. Deliver SDKs and define tool interfaces that agents call.
- MCP and Agent Integration: create integration paths that connect MCPs, agents, and data into the platform, including how customers bring their own MCPs, agents, and data, and how these integrations are scoped, isolated, and trusted within a tenant.
Requirements
- 7+ years of backend software engineering with meaningful experience in APIs, backend services, or platform infrastructure.
- Strong expertise in one or more of API design and versioning, multi-tenancy, authentication/authorization, or backend services at scale.
- Solid experience with Python (FastAPI), Kubernetes, AWS, and databases (SQL or document stores).
- Commitment to developer experience, writing clear errors, and maintaining backward compatibility.
- Ability to ship working code regularly, debug production issues, and own systems end-to-end.
- Strong cross-team collaboration, including infra, data, apps, and science teams. Internal scientists across physical and life sciences are primary users; communicate tradeoffs clearly and make decisions under ambiguity.
Technologies
- Python, FastAPI
- Kubernetes
- AWS
- SQL databases and document databases
- REST, streaming, asynchronous APIs
- OpenAPI, OIDC, OAuth 2.0
- MCP
Bonus Points For
- Experience building or maintaining multi-tenant SaaS platforms with audit, compliance, or isolation requirements (SOC 2, HIPAA, GxP, FedRAMP).
- Shipped public developer platforms, APIs, or SDKs and understanding of what makes integrations sticky.
- Familiarity with MCP, OpenAPI, or OIDC/OAuth 2.0.
- Work on tenant isolation patterns such as row-level security, per-tenant schemas, or search-path isolation.
- Experience with policy-based authorization (OPA) or externalized authorization.
About Lila
Lila Sciences is pursuing Scientific Superintelligence to address major scientific challenges. The company sees science as a compelling frontier for AI, focusing on systems that can learn rather than rely on hard-coded knowledge. Lila combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory instruments to form an operating system for science that can autonomously execute the scientific method, accelerating discovery across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai.
We Are All In
Lila Sciences is an equal opportunity employer. We prohibit discrimination based on race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or veteran status. Candidate information is processed in line with our Candidate Privacy Policy.
A Note to Agencies
Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from external sources unless contacted directly by our internal Talent Acquisition team. Resumes submitted by agencies without a signed agreement will become the property of Lila Sciences, and no referral or other fees will be owed.
