AI-Driven Materials Scientist & Research Tools Architect

Periodic Labs; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

Periodic Labs in Menlo Park, CA, is hiring a materials scientist to accelerate breakthroughs in materials discovery. The role combines experimental and computational work, building agents and tools, and fixing data issues across the pipeline.

You'll collaborate with lab scientists and the computational team, shaping data schemas that reflect what metadata matters for characterization techniques. The work rewards attention to detail and a willingness to get into the weeds.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of research or industry experience in experimental or computational materials science.
• PhD in Materials Science, Chemistry, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with lab scientists and the computational team on active research problems.
• Investigate agent traces to identify data errors and failure modes, and eliminate them at the source.
• Restructure and re-architect our materials databases around how LLM agents actually reason and fail, not just around human readability.
• Work with the hardware and automation teams to make data collection more robust.
• Build research software for lab environments, translating scientific requirements into working tools.
• Distill what you learn into evaluations that measure agent performance.

Skills

Materials science

Research experience

Data at scale

Education

PhD in Materials Science, Chemistry, or related field

Tools

Research software

Job description

Periodic Labs in Menlo Park, CA, is hiring a materials scientist to accelerate breakthroughs in materials discovery. The role combines experimental and computational work, building agents and tools, and fixing data issues across the pipeline.

You'll collaborate with lab scientists and the computational team, shaping data schemas that reflect what metadata matters for characterization techniques. The work rewards attention to detail and a willingness to get into the weeds.