Director / Senior Director of New Product Planning, Physical Science
Lila SciencesCambridge, Massachusetts, United States · Posted 2 months agoDescription
Your Impact at LILA
Lila Sciences is hiring a Director / Senior Director, New Product Planning of Physical Science to help shape Lila Origins, our company and asset creation arm which partners to translate scientific vision into molecules, materials, and real-world ventures. As a member of a small, highly cross-functional team, this role brings the commercial voice to life. The focus is on assessing where Lila's platform can produce differentiated assets and shaping how those opportunities become ventures, partnerships, or programs.
What You'll Be Building
- Source and evaluate new physical science opportunities for Origins, screening for scientific differentiation, commercial viability, and fit with Lila's platform capabilities
- Track materials science, chemistry, energy systems, and advanced manufacturing trends, including platform breakthroughs, pipeline movement, and deal activity across deep tech and industry, and translate signal into actionable views for Origins
- Match materials platforms and chemical or physical process innovations to application areas using technical rationale, competitive landscape, and unmet need, and recommend where Origins should concentrate effort
- Build and own market sizing, end-market demand, and deal economic models that inform go / no-go decisions on candidate ventures and partnerships
- Develop specifications and early commercial theses for assets under consideration, in partnership with Science, Product, and Corporate Development
- Run primary and secondary research including expert interviews, competitor tracking, and customer and supply chain landscape analysis to stress-test assumptions and sharpen recommendations
- Shape deal structures and partnership constructs alongside Corporate Development, translating commercial logic into terms that work for Lila and counterparties
- Contribute to Origins' strategic thesis by synthesizing what we learn across opportunities into recommendations on application area focus, platform bets, and partnership models
What You'll Need to Succeed
- 7 or more years in new product planning, commercial assessment, asset strategy, or business development inside a materials company, specialty chemicals organization, energy technology firm, deep tech startup, or physical science investor, with a track record of shaping go / no-go calls on early-stage assets
- Strong scientific literacy in physical sciences including materials, chemistry, physics, or advanced manufacturing; able to engage substantively with scientists and external experts and translate technical nuance into commercial implications
- Demonstrated ability to match platform technologies to application areas, with a clear point of view on where technical fit, unmet need, and competitive landscape converge
- Hands-on modeling experience across market sizing, demand forecasting, and deal economics; comfortable building models from scratch and defending assumptions
- Active fluency in industry trends, platform movement, and deal activity across materials, energy, and deep tech
- Strong written and verbal communication; able to distill complex commercial and scientific analyses into crisp recommendations for senior leadership
- Genuinely energized by building structure in undefined spaces; comfortable moving forward with limited oversight and a strong instinct for bringing clarity to ambiguous situations
Bonus Points For
- Advanced degree in a physical science discipline such as materials science, chemistry, chemical engineering, or physics, or an MBA with a deep focus on deep tech
- Well-connected across the materials, deep tech, and investment communities
- Hands-on use of AI tools in your daily work with a clear point of view on how AI is reshaping materials discovery and asset creation
Compensation
We offer competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity. Your final offer will reflect your background, expertise, and expected impact.
U.S. Benefits. Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer-paid life and disability insurance; flexible time off with generous company wide holidays; paid parental leave; an educational assistance program; commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office based employees; and a company subsidized lunch program.
International Benefits. Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market.
About LILA
Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. We believe science is the most inspiring frontier for AI. Rather than hard-coding expert knowledge into tools, LILA builds systems that can learn for themselves.
LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai.
Guided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.
We’re All In
Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.
Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.
A Note to Agencies
Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.
Similar jobs
Est. 220,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is hiring a Director/ Senior Director, Product, Materials Chemistry: a strategic, cross-functional product leader who shapes the vision, roadmap, and execution for platforms that acceler…
Est. 220,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is hiring a Director / Senior Director, New Product Planning to help shape Lila Origins, our company and asset creation arm which partners to translate scientific vision into molecules,…
Est. 220,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is hiring a (Senior) Director, Product, Electronic Materials: a strategic, cross-functional product leader who shapes the vision, roadmap, and execution for platforms that accelerate the…
Est. 147,333 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are seeking a Product Marketing Manager, Physical Sciences to lead go-to-market for Lila’s AI-driven materials and chemistry platform. You will operate at the convergence of: Physical science domai…
Est. 147,333 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are seeking an Enterprise Account Lead, Chemicals to define how Fortune 500 energy, manufacturing, and chemical companies engage with the world's first platform for scientific superintelligence. Yo…
Est. 147,333 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are seeking an Enterprise Account Lead, Materials to define how Fortune 500 energy, manufacturing, and materials companies engage with the world's first platform for scientific superintelligence. Y…
Est. 186,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is building a new Customer Delivery & Success function, and we're looking for an Associate Director / Director, Customer Program Management to lead delivery for our physical sciences…
Est. 350,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are looking for a Program Lead to own strategy and execution for Lila’s Materials Science AISF program. This role defines how and when the program delivers against Product, Science, and AI prioriti…
Est. 220,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is hiring a Director of Product, Life Sciences (Chemistry): a strategic, cross-functional product leader who shapes the vision, roadmap, and execution for platforms that accelerate the d…
Est. 275,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA The Head of Chemistry will lead Lila's chemistry organization, establishing the strategic direction and team leadership that enables Chemistry to drive impact across all of Lila's discovery and platfo…
Est. 182,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is applying its autonomous science platform to some of the hardest materials discovery problems in the world — from next-generation structural materials and extreme-environment coatings…
Est. 220,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA You will open doors to the world's most ambitious science-focused investors, institutions, and asset managers, and turn those relationships into long-term partnerships that become the foundation of Or…
Est. 129,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is seeking Platform Scientists, Soft Materials Focus to ideate, prototype, and transfer new experimental concepts for AI Science Factories targeting complex and soft material systems. In…
Est. 194,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We're building an AI-driven drug discovery factory that closes the loop between computational design and wet-lab experiment in days instead of months. The bottleneck for that loop is data: every compo…
Est. 262,900 USD
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 in…
Est. 259,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is seeking a Research Engineer, Scientific Computing and ML/Physics Infrastructure to help turn promising research tools into robust, scalable systems. This role bridges research and pro…
Est. 450,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA As the Head of Software Product you will serve as the primary architect of our software product strategy. You will lead the development of our “Agentic Superscience” software—the foundational platform…
Est. 186,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is looking for an Associate Director / Director, Strategic Finance to join our Strategic Finance team. This role sits at the center of the highest-stakes financial workstreams in the com…
Est. 195,700 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is seeking a highly skilled, hands-on Automated Systems Engineer to design, develop, and implement automation solutions across a broad range of laboratory workflows. Reporting to the Aut…
Est. 201,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are seeking a Senior Principal Scientist, Small Molecule Therapeutics to lead the protein science and structural biology strategy supporting small molecule therapeutics across Lila’s discovery plat…
Est. 300,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Lila Sciences is seeking an experienced Chief of Staff to partner with our Founder and CEO, Geoff von Maltzahn, in advancing the company's strategic and scientific priorities. Lila is building the wor…
Est. 345,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA As Lila scales its AI Science Factories globally, the VP of Engineering will create and sustain an engineering model for a unified, scalable platform for autonomous experimentation. This role will be…
Est. 178,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA The Senior/Principal Scientist, Small Molecule Therapeutics will lead early hit identification efforts, leveraging their expertise in DNA-encoded libraries (DEL) and complementary screening technologi…
Est. 240,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are seeking a computational materials scientist to discover and optimize materials for electro-optic and photonic technologies. The role centers on understanding how composition, structure, defects…
Est. 99,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We are seeking a motivated and detail-oriented Sr. RA/Associate Scientist to join our high-throughput Chemistry team. In this role, you will focus on hands-on high throughput experimentation, running…
Est. 240,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Your role will involve applying computational condensed matter physics and electronic structure expertise to accelerate materials discovery, optimization, and understanding. You will use first-princip…
Est. 354,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Own the technical direction for agentic AI systems applied to materials science at Lila. You will set and execute the roadmap for autonomous agents that plan, run, and interpret materials experiments,…
Est. 224,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We're seeking extraordinarily talented Forward Deployed Engineers to join our growing team. Our FDEs are high-performing generalists with a broad set of skills across scientific domains and software e…
Est. 266,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA We’re seeking a Vice President / Head of Marketing focused on accelerating commercial growth and strategic partnerships. This role fuels pipeline, enables revenue, and increases partner-driven adoptio…
Est. 192,000 USD
Your Impact at LILA Join us in shaping the future of science! We are seeking Senior Software Engineers with full stack experience to join our Scientific System of Record Team (SSR), where you’ll collaborate with software…