Materials Data Scientist: Hybrid Research & Tools

SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening); Menlo Park (CA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Periodic Labs seeks a Materials Scientist to work across experimental and computational research, building agents and tools to improve data, metadata, and research processes. The role blends hands-on lab work with infrastructure development to support LLM-driven scientific discovery.

The work emphasizes attention to detail and a willingness to dive into the weeds, driving improvements across data representations and agent interactions.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in experimental or computational materials science with data at scale.
• PhD in Materials Science, Chemistry, or related field, or equivalent industry experience.
• Attention to detail and willingness to dive into data and methods.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with lab scientists and the computational team on active research problems and bottlenecks.
• Investigate data/agent traces to identify and fix failures at the source.
• Restructure and re-architect databases around how LLMs reason and where they fail.
• Collaborate with hardware and automation teams to improve data collection robustness.
• Build research software for lab environments translating scientific needs into tools.
• Distill learnings into evaluations that measure agent performance.

Skills

Materials science

Data at scale

Research experience

Education

PhD in Materials Science or Chemistry

Job description

Periodic Labs seeks a Materials Scientist to work across experimental and computational research, building agents and tools to improve data, metadata, and research processes. The role blends hands-on lab work with infrastructure development to support LLM-driven scientific discovery.

The work emphasizes attention to detail and a willingness to dive into the weeds, driving improvements across data representations and agent interactions.