Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Materials Data

Periodic Labs is an AI and physical sciences company building models to accelerate breakthroughs in materials and energy. The Research Scientist/Research Engineer will work across materials research and data infrastructure, collaborating with experimental and computational scientists to build agents and tools, diagnose failures, improve materials databases, and develop evaluations for agent performance.

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 our 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