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Process Technician, Thin Films

Periodic Labs· Science
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Menlo Park, CA$45/hr - $65/hrContractPosted 2mo ago

About the role

Periodic Labs is building an autonomous laboratory for high-throughput materials discovery. We are standing up a dedicated thin-film lab in Menlo Park and hiring a Process Technician to own day-to-day tool operation, sample preparation, and first-line maintenance to keep throughput high and variance low.

Responsibilities

  • Run deposition tools to SOP. Execute recipes on vacuum-based thin-film deposition systems. Load and unload, verify chamber state and process conditions, confirm the run matched setpoints, and log the result.
  • Prepare samples. Dice and cleave coupons from full wafers; handle mounting and cross-section prep for imaging. Clean and prep substrates per workflow-specific recipes — wet cleans, oxide strip, dehydration bake, substrate and source conditioning.
  • Operate characterization tools. Collect and log structural, optical, and electrical film data. Recognize when a scan, fit, or image indicates a tool problem rather than a material result, and escalate rather than re-run blind.
  • Perform first-line and preventive maintenance. Chamber opens and cleans, source and consumable changes, shield and liner swaps, pump-down and leak checks, calibration checks, and PM scheduling. Work with vendors and facilities on service visits and keep maintenance history complete.
  • Keep the tools qualified. Run qual and monitor samples on a set cadence, track thickness, uniformity, and rate against baseline, and flag drift early. Maintain SPC-style charts where they exist and help build them where they don’t.
  • Support non-standard work. When engineers need a one-off — an unusual stack, an off-recipe parameter sweep, a new substrate geometry, an unproven prep sequence — you help scope what the tool can safely do, run it, and document what actually happened.
  • Document everything. Every run is a potential data point for our models. Record what you did rather than what the recipe said, capture failures and fixes alongside successes, and meet the metadata standards our data pipeline depends on.
  • Own lab safety and housekeeping. Chemical handling and waste, gas and precursor changes, lockout/tagout, cleanroom protocol and gowning discipline, and spares and consumables inventory - including at partner facilities we use during ramp.

Qualifications

  • 3+ years of hands-on experience operating thin-film deposition and/or metrology equipment in a semiconductor fab, R&D line, or equipment supplier environment.
  • Working knowledge of at least one deposition technique at practical detail level.
  • Sample prep skill with delicate materials — dicing or cleaving, mounting, cross-sectioning, and cleaning without artifacts.
  • Comfort with basic metrology data: reading a thickness map, sanity-checking a film measurement, spotting delamination or particles in an image.
  • Mechanical aptitude and hands-on maintenance instinct. Comfortable inside a chamber, with fittings and fasteners, and following a service procedure precisely.
  • Rigorous documentation habits and attention to detail.
  • Cleanroom experience and protocol adherence.
  • Ability to work independently, prioritize across several engineers' requests, and escalate anomalies early.

Skills

Required:Thin-film deposition tool operation
Last updated Oct 14, 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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