Associate Director / Director - Customer Program Management, Physical Sciences

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 customer partnerships. In this role, you're bringing LILA's science into the real world with customers. This is a senior, hands-on role that sits at the center of high-value, multi-year customer engagements: you will be the primary face of LILA to the customer, the operational owner of a complex program spanning multiple concurrent projects, and a founding contributor to how LILA delivers for customers as we scale.

This is not a lightweight, account management role. Our engagements are deeply technical and highly consultative, and the customer relies on you to understand where the science is, where the program is headed, and what it will take to get there. You'll coordinate across a wide set of internal teams (e.g., AI/ML researchers, experimentalists, automation and hardware engineers, software, product) while owning the customer relationship end to end and shaping where it grows next.

The role has three core dimensions:

• Customer engagement and growth: serving as the primary conduit to the customer, managing the relationship holistically, and recognizing and shaping opportunities to mature the engagement.
• Program management: driving cross-functional operational excellence in a complex scientific environment so that delivery happens to scope, on time, and with quality.
• Delivery infrastructure: helping stand up a new function by building the processes, tooling, and operating models that define what customer delivery looks like across LILA.

What You'll Be Building

Customer Engagement & Growth

• Intentional Relationship Management: Serve as the primary contact and trusted operational interface for the customer, owning the health and trajectory of the relationship over time.
• Clear & Structured Communication: Translate complex internal program status into clear, structured communication for the customer– surfacing and steering milestones, risks, and decisions.
• Trust-Building Governance: steering committees, milestone reviews, deliverable handoffs, and the difficult conversations (delays, quality incidents, scope changes) that sustain trust through the hard moments.
• Customer Renewal & Expansion: Identify and shape opportunities to grow the engagement, partnering with business development and product to bring them to life.

Program Management

• Operational Excellence: Own end-to-end delivery across multiple concurrent projects under a single partnership timelines, resourcing, milestone tracking, dependency & risk management. Promote a high-performance team environment through operational rigor across the program, coaching the wider team toward practices that outlast any one person.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Coordinate a cross-functional "team of teams" that speaks different technical languages, keeping everyone aligned on shared objectives and clear on priorities and decision points.
• Shared Truth & Situational Awareness: Structure and run effective program meetings, decision forums, and reporting so the right information reaches the right people at the right time.
• Strategic Judgment: Hold many considerations at once (e.g., customer needs, technical constraints, resourcing, risk) and exercise the judgment to chart a course when there's no obviously right answer, recommending a path forward and knowing when to rethink the approach entirely rather than optimize the current one.

Delivery Infrastructure

• Building for Scale: Help build the operating model for customer delivery at Lila: scalable processes, templates, tooling, and best practices that extend well beyond this single program.
• Setting the Standard: Define what operational excellence and delivery success look like for the function, including the metrics and KPIs worth tracking.
• Servant Leadership: Lead with Lila's broader mission in view and contribute to a founding team of delivery leaders be generous with hard-won lessons, invest in your peers' success, and build the low-visibility shared infrastructure that lifts the whole function rather than only your own program.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• A graduate degree (MS, PhD, or equivalent experience) in a physical science or technical discipline (materials science, chemistry, chemical or mechanical engineering, physics, AI/ML research, or a related field), with enough grounding to engage credibly with scientific and technical stakeholders.
• 8+ years of experience in a technical or scientific industry, with 5+ years in program management, delivery, or a similar cross-functional coordination role carrying direct responsibility for timelines, resourcing, and tracking.
• Demonstrated experience as the primary customer-facing owner of a relationship
• Sound judgment about customer relationship health over time: knowing when to push, when to absorb, when to escalate, and how to deliver hard news in a way that strengthens rather than erodes trust.
• A track record of agency in driving execution across complex, multidisciplinary programs with significant technical and commercial stakes.
• Outstanding communication skills, with the ability to distill complex technical and operational information for diverse audiences, from working scientists to executive leadership to customers.
• Proven ability to influence without authority and drive alignment across cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrated ability to thrive and build amid ambiguity and rapid growth; able to create structure where little exists and to turn one-off solutions into repeatable processes.

Bonus Points For

• Experience at or partnering with AI-native, platform-based, or otherwise technically sophisticated science or technology companies.
• Deep familiarity with R&D workflows (experimental iteration, instrumentation and characterization, data quality, scale-up) across one or more of materials, formulations, energy, semiconductors, or related domains.
• Experience managing external collaborations or partnerships in a discovery or R&D, or technical-delivery setting
• Familiarity with project management methods and tools (e.g., critical path analysis, scenario planning, resource modeling, portfolio reporting).
• Experience with LLMs and point of view on how AI and automation are changing how technical work gets delivered

Expected Base Salary Range 148000 - 224000 USD