Computational Scientist, Differentiable Physics

The role

You will build differentiable, accelerator-ready simulations for continuum-physics problems. This involves combining simulation with deep learning for surrogate modeling, learned physics, and optimization.

What you will do

• Build and extend differentiable solvers for continuum simulation.
• Implement numerical methods from equations and papers.
• Diagnose convergence, stability, and modeling failures.
• Combine simulation with deep learning for surrogate modeling, learned physics, inverse problems, parameter estimation, and optimization.
• Use automatic differentiation and modern accelerators with JAX or PyTorch.
• Validate models against experiments, trusted benchmarks, or high-fidelity simulations.
• Create datasets and evaluations to guide the development of LLMs.

Required qualifications

• A PhD or equivalent research experience in applied mathematics, computational science, physics, engineering, computer science, or a related field.
• Code-level experience building or substantially modifying PDE solvers, numerical methods, or differentiable simulations.
• Deep expertise in at least one continuum domain, with breadth across domains or a demonstrated ability to learn new physics quickly.
• Meaningful experience building, training, and evaluating deep-learning models for physical systems.
• Strong Python and software-engineering skills, especially JAX, PyTorch, Julia, or C++.
• Experience applying simulation to realistic scientific or engineering problems.
• A startup mentality: ownership, good judgment under uncertainty, and enthusiasm for building from scratch.

Nice to have

• Experience with fluid dynamics plus another continuum domain, or with multiphysics and multiscale modeling.
• Expertise in adjoint methods, implicit differentiation, differentiable programming, or scientific optimization.
• Experience accelerating scientific software on GPUs or TPUs.
• Contributions to scientific open-source software used by others.
• Experience connecting simulation to experiments, engineering decisions, semiconductors, or autonomous workflows.

Before you apply

• We sponsor visas and will do everything we can to assist in this process.

About the company

Periodic Labs is building AI systems that can simulate physical science, verify predictions, and train on the full scientific method.