Data Engineer, Materials
Summary
Data Engineer at Periodic Labs restructures materials databases for agentic systems and collaborates with scientists on research problems, working with LLM agents and research software in a hybrid research-infrastructure role.
About Periodic Labs
We're an AI and physical sciences company building state-of-the-art models to accelerate breakthroughs across materials, energy, and beyond. Backed by world-class investors and growing rapidly, we operate at the pace the frontier requires. Our team brings deep expertise, genuine ownership, and an insatiable drive to push the boundaries of what's scientifically possible.
About the Role
We're hiring a materials scientist to bridge our computational and experimental databases with the LLM agents that need to navigate them. This is a hybrid research and infrastructure role: you'll spend roughly half your time restructuring our materials databases so they're legible to agentic systems, and the other half working directly with our lab scientists and computational team on active research problems.
The database work requires real domain depth, not just data engineering skill. For example, you need to know what metadata actually matters for a given characterization technique. The research work keeps you grounded in the problems we're actually using LLMs to solve, so the schemas you build serve real research rather than an abstraction of it.
You'll be as much a materials scientist doing research as you are the person making our agentic harness actually work.
What You'll Do
Restructure and re-architect materials databases (lab experiments, characterization data, computations) so they're usable by agentic systems, drawing on domain expertise about how to represent the data and what metadata matters
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
Design data structures around how LLM agents actually reason and fail, not just around human readability
Build research software for lab environments, translating scientific requirements into working tools
Move fluidly between research contribution and infrastructure ownership, splitting time roughly evenly between the two
Mechanics
Minimum experience: 4+ years
Minimum education: PhD in Materials Science, Chemistry, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience
Location: Menlo Park, CA or Montreal, Canada. (Soon: San Francisco, too)
Compensation: $250,000-350,000 + equity
Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas.