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Software Engineer

Periodic Labs· Science
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Menlo Park, CA$250k - $350kFull-timePosted 8mo ago

About the role

Software engineers to build backend and distributed systems for an AI-native physical science lab, turning scientific intent into reliable execution across scheduling workloads, orchestration of experiments, and integration with instruments and automation.

Responsibilities

  • Design and build backend and distributed systems that execute scientific work reliably.
  • Build scheduling and orchestration for long-running workflows across compute clusters, instruments, and other shared resources.
  • Create clear APIs, data models, and service boundaries connecting research software, lab information systems, instruments, and automation.
  • Make execution inspectable and recoverable through durable state, retries, failure handling, observability, and provenance.
  • Turn promising research prototypes and scientific workflows into maintainable production systems.
  • Diagnose bottlenecks and failures across application code, infrastructure, data, and hardware integrations.
  • Work closely with scientists and engineers to improve experimental throughput, reliability, and reproducibility.

Qualifications

  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of building production backend or distributed systems.
  • Experience with asynchronous or long-running work, such as batch jobs, workflow orchestration, data pipelines, schedulers, or shared-resource systems.
  • The ability to reason clearly about concurrency, idempotency, partial failures, consistency, and resource contention.
  • Experience designing maintainable APIs and data models for complex systems.
  • Strong debugging skills across services, infrastructure, dependencies, and data.
  • Comfort working with technical collaborators to turn ambiguous needs into reliable systems.

Skills

Required:Backend developmentDistributed systems designAsynchronous / long-running work
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Periodic Labs

From bits to atoms.

Periodic Labs is an artificial intelligence research company pioneering the next leap in scientific discovery. We operate at the intersection of machine learning and scientific experimentation under the thesis that that true understanding of the universe is only possible by interacting and experimenting on it.

artificial intelligencescientific discoverymachine learningscientific experimentation
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