Product Engineer

Department: Bits: Research, LLMs, machine learning, infra

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

We’re hiring a product engineer to build the agentic software layer between our frontier models, our scientific data, our lab systems, and the scientists using them. You’ll build the environment where materials scientists work alongside AI agents to plan experiments, run analyses, coordinate workflows, and turn results into decisions. The right person for this role is excited to define what the working interface between scientists and AI should actually look like.

You’ll turn cutting-edge models into products that become part of real scientific workflows, both inside Periodic and in customer environments. That means designing interfaces, orchestrating tools and agents, integrating with lab and data systems, and building the feedback loops that improve both product behavior and model performance.

As one of our first product hires, you’ll help define product engineering at Periodic: technically deep, ambitious in scope, and tightly coupled to real scientific work.

What You’ll Do

• Prototype quickly and ship continuously — build high-leverage products that become part of scientists’ daily workflow, then refine them through direct feedback from the lab and from customers

• Build agentic products and interfaces on top of our frontier models and scientific data, including copilots, experiment planning systems, workflow automation, operational tools, and new interaction patterns that go beyond chat

• Design how scientists direct, supervise, and collaborate with AI agents across experiment planning, execution, analysis, and decision-making

• Work closely with model researchers to shape product behavior, evaluation signals, telemetry, and feedback loops that improve both the product experience and the underlying models

• Own the product end to end, from data model and backend systems to APIs, user experience, deployment, and observability

• Spend time with scientists in the lab, understand where time and attention are being lost, and turn those bottlenecks into products before they are formally requested

• Help define the product engineering culture at Periodic, including standards for speed, quality, ambition, and taste

Mechanics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or similar experience

Location: Menlo Park, CA (Soon: San Francisco, too)

Compensation: $250,000-$350,000 base + equity

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

We’re building a team of the world’s best — the scientists, engineers, and problem-solvers who don’t just follow the frontier but 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.