periodic-labs
Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Materials Data
$250K–$350K
Menlo Park, CA · On-site · Full-time · Posted Sep 1, 2026
- Experience
- 4+ years of research or industry experience in experimental or computational materials science and working with data at scale.
- Education
- PhD in Materials Science, Chemistry, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
- Visa sponsorship
- Yes, we sponsor visas.
About the job
Work with scientists to improve materials data, build research tools and agents, and evaluate agent performance for materials discovery.
What you'll do
- Partner with lab and computational scientists on active research problems; build research software for lab environments.
- Investigate agent traces and fix data errors and agent failure modes at their source; restructure materials databases for agent use.
- Collaborate with hardware and automation teams to improve data collection and develop evaluations of agent performance.
What they ask for
- 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.
Pay
$250,000-350,000 USD base salary
Tools
LLMs
AI focus
Build and improve LLM agents for materials discovery by addressing data and agent failure modes, restructuring data for agent reasoning, and evaluating agent performance.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative