Materials Scientist (Hybrid) – AI Research & Data Tools

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

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Equity

Hybrid work

Job summary

Periodic Labs in Menlo Park, CA seeks a materials scientist to accelerate discoveries in materials by building robust data schemas and agent-based tools. You will work alongside experimental and computational teams to identify data bottlenecks and fix failures at the source.

This hybrid role blends hands-on research with infrastructure work, requiring deep domain knowledge and attention to detail to ensure data-driven insights drive real experiments and discoveries.

Qualifications

• PhD required or equivalent industry experience.
• 4+ years of research in materials science.
• Experience with large-scale data handling.

Responsibilities

• Work with lab scientists and the computational team on active problems.
• Identify data errors and eliminate agentic failure modes at the source.
• Restructure materials databases around how LLMs reason and fail.
• Collaborate with hardware and automation teams to improve data collection.
• Build research software translating scientific requirements 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 in Menlo Park, CA seeks a materials scientist to accelerate discoveries in materials by building robust data schemas and agent-based tools. You will work alongside experimental and computational teams to identify data bottlenecks and fix failures at the source.

This hybrid role blends hands-on research with infrastructure work, requiring deep domain knowledge and attention to detail to ensure data-driven insights drive real experiments and discoveries.