Director/Senior Director, Molecular Discovery

Job description

Your Impact at LILA 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. 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. What You'll Be Building Own small molecule discovery programs against assigned targets, from hit identification through lead optimization and candidate nomination. Serve as the accountable leader for discovery output setting and hitting timelines, quality benchmarks, and throughput targets across active programs. 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. 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. 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. Define and enforce the quality standards, assay cascades, and decision criteria that govern how compounds progress through the pipeline. Facilitate relationships with CROs and external partners for specialized studies (e.g., in vivo pharmacology, safety pharmacology, DMPK) that sit outside the automated platform. Provide drug discovery expertise to Lila's product team for commercial partnerships, translating platform capabilities into credible value propositions for pharma and biotech collaborators. What You'll Need to Succeed Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, chemical biology, or a closely related discipline. 12+ yea…