Process Development Engineer

Department: Atoms: Research Lab, physics, chemistry

Location: Menlo Park

Employment Type: FullTime

About Periodic Labs

The most important scientific discoveries of our time won’t happen in a traditional lab. 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

As a Process Development Engineer, you will play a crucial role in designing and optimizing the workflows and tools that enable high-efficiency process technologies, primarily for the semiconductor industry. You will contribute to lab design and expansion, define hardware engineering specs, perform hardware characterization, and troubleshoot complex engineering issues.

You will also be hands-on in establishing and standardizing process flows, generating and analyzing data, creating technical documentation, and engaging with customers to ensure alignment between lab capabilities and market needs. In this role, you will experiment, learn, and collaborate daily with internal teams spanning AI/ML, simulation, automation, and physics/chemistry to build scalable solutions for high-value problems.

What You’ll Do

• Process Engineering: Bring structure to unstructured workflows by establishing process control metrics. Conduct complex design of experiments (DOE), define recipe structures from scratch, implement statistical process control (SPC) and fault detection and classification (FDC), and extend these practices across a wide range of equipment.

• Lab Development: Contribute to the design, construction, and scale-up of an AI-accelerated thin-film and semiconductor processing laboratory, enabling scientists to pursue materials discovery.

• Customer & Vendor Engagement: Communicate and engage directly with key customers and vendors to resolve highly complex process engineering issues and address customer High Value Problems (HVPs). Build modular test stands or hardware needed for proof-of-concept experiments.

• Documentation & Data: Create internal and external documentation, strategies, procedures, presentations, and technical reports, and establish standardized data pipelines to feed into AI training infrastructure.

You Will Thrive in This Role If You Have

• BS, MS, or PhD in Engineering (Mechanical, Chemical, Electrical), Materials Science, or a related field.

• Extensive hands-on experience in process engineering or equipment engineering in the semiconductor manufacturing industry.

• Strong understanding of overall semiconductor process flows and cross-module process integrations.

• Expertise in the hardware design and underlying mechanisms of high-vacuum systems, advanced deposition/etch platforms, or metrology tools.

• Startup-ready mindset: able to operate effectively in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment while implementing industry-standard best practices.

Mechanics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education and training or experience

Location: Our lab is located in Menlo Park and we prefer folks to be located in Menlo Park or San Francisco but can be flexible based on role

Compensation: The annual compensation range for this role — $175,000-$275,000

Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas and will do everything we can to assist in this process with our legal support.

We’re building a team of the world’s best — the scientists, engineers, and problem-solvers who don’t just follow the frontier, they define it. If you’re driven to bring AI to life in the physical world and make discoveries that have never been made before, you belong here.