Sr. Principal or Engineering Advisor - Agentic Lab Automation Integration

Position Summary

• Engineer the connective tissue between agentic AI and physical lab systems, integrating with robotic platforms, analytical instruments, and data pipelines.
• Design agent workflows that reason over experimental data, trigger automated actions, and surface insights to scientists.
• Prototype rapidly, product ionize effective solutions, and collaborate with chemists, biologists, and automation engineers to deploy intelligent systems that accelerate molecule discovery.

• Build multi-agent systems with orchestration, state management, error recovery, and tool integration.
• Prototype and iterate on agent planning, memory systems, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
• Interface agent architectures with lab automation platforms (Hamilton, Tecan, Opentrons) for closed-loop execution.

• Transition prototypes into reliable lab operations with automation engineers and scientists.
• Deploy and maintain containerized services using Docker and Kubernetes with Git Ops and CI/CD.
• Integrate cloud orchestration (e.g., Argo on Kubernetes) with laboratory control systems.

• Publish, give talks, review papers, and scout emerging trends in AI@Lilly and external communities.
• Evaluate vendors, open-source projects, and academic collaborations.

• PhD (or MS + 2 yrs / BS + 5 yrs) in Chemical/Mechanical Engineering, Robotics, Computer Engineering, or related field; demonstrated wet-lab automation experience.
• Experience with laboratory automation systems and LIMS engineering.
• Experience integrating software control and/or AI systems with lab automation (liquid handlers, analytical instruments, robotic workflows).
• Strong containerization (Docker) and Kubernetes orchestration experience in production.
• Scalable production Python applications (e.g., Redis, FastAPI, Flask/Streamlit, pytest).

• LLM post-training (fine-tuning, RLHF).
• Integrate AI/decision systems with lab automation.
• Build/maintain translation layer between planning logic and instrument control.
• Research contributions/publications (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR).