Research Scientist/Engineer, Materials

Periodic Labs
Menlo Park
Workplace: HybridFull timeUSD 250,000 - 350,000 annuallyFunction: Data Science & Machine LearningExperience: 4+ yearsEducation: phdSkills: ["Attention to detail","Ownership","Problem-solving","Ability to get into technical details","Cross-functional collaboration"]

Automate materials discovery by partnering with experimental and computational scientists to diagnose where LLM agents and data representations fail. You’ll investigate agent traces, fix data errors at the source, and re-architect materials databases around how agents reason and fail. The role also includes building research software for lab environments, improving data-collection robustness with hardware/automation teams, and creating evaluation metrics to measure agent performance.

Loading

Loading job details...

Preparing the role view and application actions.

FursaFursa
Periodic Labs
Periodic Labs
2 days ago

Research Scientist/Engineer, Materials

✓ Verified Job

Canonical indexed version, validated from employer's careers page.

Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 36 minutes agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Automate materials discovery by partnering with experimental and computational scientists to diagnose where LLM agents and data representations fail. You’ll investigate agent traces, fix data errors at the source, and re-architect materials databases around how agents reason and fail. The role also includes building research software for lab environments, improving data-collection robustness with hardware/automation teams, and creating evaluation metrics to measure agent performance.
Location: Menlo Park
Workplace: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Data Science & Machine Learning
Seniority: Mid level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Work with lab and computational teams on active research problems tied to LLM-agent bottlenecks.
  • •Investigate agent traces to identify data errors and failure modes, eliminating issues at the source.
  • •Re-structure and re-architect materials databases around agent reasoning and failure, prioritizing relevant metadata.
  • •Partner with hardware and automation teams to make data collection more robust.
  • •Build research software for lab environments, translating scientific requirements into tools and evaluation metrics for agent performance.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 250,000 - 350,000 annually
Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:Equity

Key Requirements

  • •4+ years of research or industry experience in experimental or computational materials science and working with data at scale.
  • •PhD in Materials Science, Chemistry, or a related field (or equivalent industry experience).
  • •Domain depth to understand what metadata matters for characterization techniques.
  • •Experience investigating data errors and agentic failure modes using detailed traces.
  • •Ability to restructure and re-architect materials databases to match how LLM agents reason and fail.
Experience:4+ years
Education:PhD / Doctorate in Materials Science, Chemistry
Skills:Attention to detailOwnershipProblem-solvingAbility to get into technical detailsCross-functional collaboration

Eligibility

Work Authorization:Sponsorship available.

Company Brief

Periodic Labs
Periodic Labs (periodic.com) — Public information about this company’s products, industry focus, size, funding, and headquarters is not available. Check the company’s official profiles or contact them directly for accurate details about their offerings and operations.
Industry: Other
Website