Senior Principal Scientist, Small Molecule Therapeutics

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 platform. This individual will oversee recombinant protein construct design and engineering, expression and purification, and structural biology workflows that enable screening, hit validation, and structure-guided drug design. Working closely with Lila’s screening, assay development, and chemistry teams, this role will help define, build, and scale internal capabilities for protein expression, purification, and structural enablement. The ideal candidate is a highly experienced protein scientist and drug discovery leader who can operate strategically while remaining deeply engaged in experimental design, vendor selection, data interpretation, and cross-functional program execution. What You'll Be Building Lead the protein science strategy for small molecule programs, ensuring timely delivery of high-quality protein reagents for screening, assay development, biophysics, crystallography, Cryo-EM, and downstream validation. Oversee recombinant protein expression and purification efforts across external partners and CROs, including vendor selection, scope definition, protocol review, troubleshooting, quality assessment, and timeline management. Develop and execute a roadmap to bring recombinant protein expression and purification capabilities in-house over time, including recommendations on infrastructure, workflows, staffing, instrumentation, and quality standards. Lead construct design and protein engineering efforts to enable soluble, stable, active, and structurally tractable protein reagents across diverse target classes. Design construct strategies including domain boundaries, truncations, tags, mutations, fusion partners, stabilizing variants, ortholog selection, and expression system selection. Partner with assay biology, screening, chemistry, comput