Procurement & Finance Operations Manager

The role

This person will own procurement, inventory strategy, operational finance, and purchasing systems across laboratory and R&D environments. They will build operational infrastructure to scale experimentation volume while maintaining financial discipline and inventory reliability.

What you will do

• Own purchasing operations across lab consumables, specialty materials, gases, chemicals, equipment, and operational supplies
• Develop inventory forecasting systems and consumption tracking processes
• Build systems to analyze and track the true cost of scientific experiments
• Own purchase order generation, invoice reconciliation, and three-way matching workflows
• Track operational and capital expenditures against budgets
• Design and implement scalable procurement, inventory, and operational finance systems
• Improve workflows through automation, tooling, inventory tracking systems, dashboards, and process optimization
• Partner with scientists, engineers, lab operations, finance, and leadership teams
• Manage supplier and vendor relationships, including pricing negotiations and purchasing agreements
• Identify operational bottlenecks and build infrastructure to scale R&D environments

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in procurement, operational finance, lab operations, supply chain, or related operational roles
• Experience supporting technical, scientific, manufacturing, hardware, or R&D environments
• Strong understanding of budgeting, forecasting, spend tracking, and operational analytics
• Experience owning procurement workflows, purchasing operations, and vendor management
• Experience with PO, accounting, and spend management systems (e.g., Ramp, QuickBooks, NetSuite, SAP, Coupa, Quartzy, etc.)
• Strong systems-thinking mindset with demonstrated process improvement experience
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-changing startup environments
• Highly organized with exceptional attention to detail
• Strong cross-functional communication skills
• Bachelor’s degree or similar experience

Nice to have

• Experience in advanced materials, hardware, robotics, biotech, semiconductor, or scientific lab environments
• Experience building procurement or inventory systems from scratch
• Experience implementing inventory tracking systems (QR/barcode workflows, inventory software, etc.)
• Experience with operational finance, manufacturing finance, or COGS analysis
• Experience supporting high-throughput R&D or experimental environments
• Familiarity with automation workflows, reporting systems, or operational tooling
• Basic financial modeling and analytics skills

Before you apply

• Visa sponsorship: Yes, 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.