AI Materials Science Lead & Task Architect

Turing; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Turing is seeking a Materials Science expert to lead a pod of 5–10 trainers focused on creating authentic, terminal-based scientific tasks for frontier AI training. You will review tasks for accuracy across DFT, thermodynamics, phase diagrams, and materials properties, ensuring reproducible results and meaningful evaluation metrics.

Ideal candidates have a Ph.D. or equivalent, strong Python/C/C++/Fortran/Julia skills, and experience in atomistic simulations or computational thermodynamics.

Qualifications

• Ph.D., postdoctoral experience or equivalent advanced technical experience in Materials Science, Metallurgy, or related field.
• Proficient in Python, C/C++, Fortran, or Julia; Linux and terminal-based environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a pod of technical trainers, ensuring quality, productivity and timely delivery of tasks.
• Review scientific tasks end to end: problem statements, crystal structures, interatomic potentials, thermodynamic databases, simulation inputs, reference solutions, and automated tests.
• Validate tasks involving DFT, molecular dynamics, computational thermodynamics, phase diagrams, crystallography, materials characterization, mechanical properties, semiconductors, and energy materials.
• Ensure tasks reflect realistic workflows and require multi-step scientific reasoning beyond simple lookups.
• Verify scientific correctness across units, convergence criteria, electronic structure calculations, thermodynamic consistency, and simulation parameters.
• Validate computational environments, software, pseudopotentials, interatomic potentials, and dependencies for reproducibility.
• Review automated graders to ensure meaningful outputs: lattice parameters, formation energies, band gaps, elastic constants, phonon properties, phase fractions, diffusion coefficients, and microstructure metrics.
• Identify inaccuracies, unrealistic assumptions, numerical tolerance issues, and opportunities to bypass calculations.
• Provide actionable feedback, track revisions, and ensure quality issues are resolved before task approval.
• Onboard trainers, allocate work, monitor quality and throughput, elevate blockers, and maintain technical documentation and best practices.

Skills

Python

C/C++

Fortran

Julia

Linux

Terminal

Education

Ph.D., postdoctoral experience or equivalent

Tools

Docker

Git

CI/CD

HPC

Quantum ESPRESSO

VASP

GPAW

ABINIT

LAMMPS

pymatgen

ASE

spglib

phonopy

pycalphad

MOOSE

FiPy

OVITO

DREAM3D

Job description

Turing is seeking a Materials Science expert to lead a pod of 5–10 trainers focused on creating authentic, terminal-based scientific tasks for frontier AI training. You will review tasks for accuracy across DFT, thermodynamics, phase diagrams, and materials properties, ensuring reproducible results and meaningful evaluation metrics.

Ideal candidates have a Ph.D. or equivalent, strong Python/C/C++/Fortran/Julia skills, and experience in atomistic simulations or computational thermodynamics.