Principal Scientist / Associate Director, Soft Materials Experimentation

Your Impact at LILA

Lila is hiring a Scientific Leader to build and run our experimental soft materials team, covering formulations, polymers, colloids, gels, emulsions, inks, adhesives, and coatings. You will take on a group of four scientists and grow it as the portfolio expands across formulation, rheological and scattering characterization, and polymer processing. The team turns soft-matter problems into closed-loop autonomous workflows: defining what gets measured, how it gets measured at throughput, and how the resulting data supports active learning and inverse design. The work asks you to stay close to the bench while mentoring a growing team and setting its direction over a multi-year growth horizon.

What You'll Be Building

• Lead and grow a group of scientists spanning formulation, polymer processing, and physical characterization; set scientific direction, develop the team, and hire against an expanding portfolio
• Own the experimental strategy for soft materials — the measurement stack, the campaign designs, and the scientific validity of what the group publishes internally and to partners
• Hold your team's delivery on partner-funded programs alongside the technical program managers who own the programs themselves, setting the standard on timelines, throughput, and data quality
• Build and validate high-throughput workflows spanning melt and solution rheology, scattering, thermal and mechanical analysis, microfluidics, and application-specific performance testing
• Define the measurement strategies that make machine learning and inverse design tractable, and partner with modeling and AI colleagues to close the loop from proposed candidate to validated formulation
• Work with automation and engineering colleagues to move prototype workflows into production with reliable instrument control, structured data capture, and end-to-end robotics
• Provide technical depth on new opportunities: feasibility assessment, scoping, and customer-facing scientific engagement
• Justify and manage capital equipment and vendor relationships for the group; set the expectation on safe handling for its chemical footprint and hold the group to it
• Coordinate shared characterization capability and cross-domain campaigns with adjacent materials and chemistry groups

What You'll Need to Succeed

• PhD in Materials Science, Polymer Science, Chemical Engineering, or Chemistry with 8+ years of post-degree R&D experience, or equivalent depth built through industrial practice
• Experience leading scientific teams, whether as a formal manager or as a technical lead with direct responsibility for others' work
• Deep soft-matter fundamentals: phase behavior, self-assembly, rheology, interfacial phenomena, colloid and dispersion stability, transport, cure and crosslinking
• Hands-on record formulating and characterizing multicomponent systems and translating structure–property relationships into performance
• Demonstrated delivery against external milestones with industrial partners or sponsored programs
• Data-centric experimental practice: DoE, high-throughput methods, structured capture, and working with ML colleagues as a peer rather than a customer
• Comfort moving between strategy and bench-level troubleshooting, and leading a team split across multiple sites

Bonus Points For

• Depth in one or more application areas such as adhesives and coatings, printed electronics, energy materials, or consumer and personal care
• Experience taking formulations from lab through scale-up and manufacturability review
• Robotic or automated formulation, automated characterization, or self-driving lab environments
• Python proficiency for analysis, instrument control, or workflow orchestration
• Familiarity with EHS and regulatory constraints on formulated products