Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Materials Data
Periodic Labs· Science
Menlo Park, CA$250k - $350kFull-timePosted 1mo ago
About the role
Hybrid research and infrastructure role focused on automating scientific research in materials discovery. Combine experimental/computational collaboration with data-centric work to fix data/data pipelines, build tools for LLM-driven research, and strengthen data representation for agents.
Responsibilities
- Work directly with lab scientists and the computational team on active research problems, staying close to the actual bottlenecks LLM agents are meant to solve.
- Investigate agent traces to identify data errors and agentic failure modes, and eliminate them at the source.
- Restructure and re-architect materials databases (lab experiments, characterization data, computations) around how LLM agents actually reason and fail, not just around human readability. Draw on domain expertise about how to represent the data and what metadata matters.
- Work with the hardware and automation teams to make data collection more robust.
- Build research software for lab environments, translating scientific requirements into working tools.
- Distill what you learn into evaluations that measure agent performance.
Qualifications
- Minimum experience: 4+ years of research or industry experience in experimental or computational materials science and working with data at scale.
- Minimum education: PhD in Materials Science, Chemistry, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
Skills
Required:Materials science expertiseData architecture for materials dataResearch software developmentCollaboration with experimental and computational teams
Last updated Sep 30, 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
More open roles at Periodic Labs
- Process Safety Engineer1w agoMenlo Park, CA · Engineering
- Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Midtraining2w agoMenlo Park, CA · Engineering
- Research Scientist, Scaling RL2w agoMenlo Park, CA; Montreal, Canada · Engineering
- Controller2w agoMenlo Park, CA · Business and Operations
- XRD Facility Manager1mo agoMenlo Park, CA · Science