periodic-labs
Software Engineer
$250K–$350K
Menlo Park, CA · On-site · Full-time · Posted Feb 10, 2026
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree or similar experience
- Visa sponsorship
- Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas.
About the job
Build backend and distributed systems that schedule, orchestrate, and reliably execute scientific workloads, experiments, and lab automation.
What you'll do
- Design backend and distributed systems for reliable scientific execution, including scheduling and orchestration across compute clusters, instruments, and shared resources.
- Build APIs, data models, and service boundaries; make workflows inspectable and recoverable through durable state, retries, failure handling, observability, and provenance.
- Turn research prototypes into production systems, diagnose failures across software and hardware integrations, and collaborate with scientists to improve research throughput and reproducibility.
What they ask for
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record 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.
- Ability to reason about concurrency, idempotency, partial failures, consistency, and resource contention.
- Experience designing maintainable APIs and data models for complex systems; strong debugging skills.
Nice to have
- Large-scale batch or distributed compute, scientific simulation, GPU workloads, or ML infrastructure.
- Experience with workflow engines, lab or process-control systems, robotics, hardware controls, industrial automation, or physical lab/manufacturing/materials-science settings.
Pay
$250,000-350,000 USD base salary
AI focus
Build software systems supporting an AI-native physical science lab, including simulation infrastructure, lab orchestration, and automation systems.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative