Software Engineer

The role

Software engineers will build backend and distributed systems for an AI-native physical science lab. You will design scheduling and orchestration for scientific workloads, experiments, and automation.

What you will do

• Design and build backend and distributed systems that execute scientific work reliably.
• Build scheduling and orchestration for long-running workflows across compute clusters, instruments, and other shared resources.
• Create clear APIs, data models, and service boundaries connecting research software, lab information systems, instruments, and automation.
• Make execution inspectable and recoverable through durable state, retries, failure handling, observability, and provenance.
• Turn promising research prototypes and scientific workflows into maintainable production systems.
• Diagnose bottlenecks and failures across application code, infrastructure, data, and hardware integrations.
• Work closely with scientists and engineers to improve experimental throughput, reliability, and reproducibility.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or similar experience
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of building production backend or distributed systems.
• Experience with asynchronous or long-running work, such as batch jobs, workflow orchestration, data pipelines, schedulers, or shared-resource systems.
• The ability to reason clearly about concurrency, idempotency, partial failures, consistency, and resource contention.
• Experience designing maintainable APIs and data models for complex systems.
• Strong debugging skills across services, infrastructure, dependencies, and data.
• Comfort working with technical collaborators to turn ambiguous needs into reliable systems.

Nice to have

• Large-scale batch or distributed compute, scientific simulation, GPU workloads, or ML infrastructure.
• Workflow engines, DAG orchestration, job schedulers, or cluster execution systems.
• LIMS, MES, ERP, process-control systems, lab informatics, or scientific data management.
• Robotics, hardware controls, instrument drivers, vendor APIs or SDKs, or industrial automation.
• Experience in a physical lab, manufacturing environment, or materials-science setting.

Before you apply

• We sponsor visas.

About the company

Periodic Labs is an AI and physical sciences company building state-of-the-art models to accelerate breakthroughs across materials, energy, and beyond.