Research Scientist/Engineer

Periodic Labs

Job details

  • ONSITE
  • FULL_TIME
  • Menlo Park
  • United States
  • Verified 2026-09-26
  • Source: Periodic Labs public ASHBY source

Original job description

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 a drive to push the boundaries of what's scientifically possible.

About the Role

We're training frontier models to develop deep scientific knowledge and reasoning for scientific discovery. As a Midtraining Research Engineer, you'll take base models and improve their scientific reasoning: curating and generating data, building evals, and running large-scale training experiments. Your work will also lay the groundwork for our pre-training efforts down the line.

What You'll Do

  • Identify, process, and curate novel sources of scientific data for large-scale model training.

  • Generate high-quality synthetic data to fill gaps in scientific knowledge and reasoning.

  • Build evaluations that correlate with downstream scientific task performance, working closely with RL researchers, physicists, and chemists.

  • Develop and apply techniques such as self-distillation and on-policy distillation to improve model capability.

  • Design and run large-scale training experiments, partnering with supercompute engineers to scale efficiently across thousands of GPUs.

  • Build tools for yourself and the team to investigate how data choices shape model intelligence.

You Will Thrive in This Role If You Have

  • Experience training LLMs on curated mixes of trillions of tokens.

  • Experience on a dedicated evals team supporting a large production training run.

  • Hands-on use of self-distillation, on-policy distillation, or similar methods in a real training pipeline.

  • Experience with scaling laws and compute-optimal hyperparameters.

  • Comfort working across data, evals, and training infrastructure.

Especially Strong Candidates May Also Have

  • Experience optimizing throughput and reliability for large-scale distributed training runs.

  • A background in AI for science or training on specialized domain data (e.g., protein, materials, or other scientific datasets).

  • Experience creating evals or synthetic data for non verifiable tasks and tracking performance over live runs.

Mechanics

  • Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or similar experience

  • Location: Menlo Park, CA

  • Compensation: $250,000–$350,000 + equity

  • Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas and will do everything we can to assist in this process.

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