About the job
About Periodic Labs
At Periodic Labs, we are pioneering advancements at the intersection of artificial intelligence and physical sciences. Our mission is to develop cutting-edge models that facilitate groundbreaking scientific discoveries. With substantial funding and a trajectory of rapid growth, our team operates as a community of owners, empowered to identify and navigate challenges without the constraints of bureaucracy. We are passionate learners, continuously seeking new tools and scientific insights to propel our mission forward.
About the Role
In this pivotal role, you will be responsible for architecting and scaling our Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) that drive the operations of our automated materials synthesis laboratory. You will take ownership of scheduling, workflow management, and data provenance systems that integrate a variety of instruments, including furnaces, dispensers, and diffractometers, to enable the large-scale synthesis of innovative materials. Your work will involve creating workflow orchestration for multi-step synthesis processes, as well as instrument scheduling systems that effectively manage resource contention, prioritize tasks, and handle batching on shared equipment. You will ensure comprehensive lineage tracking for every sample action taken. Your technical expertise will span the full stack, from Python backend development to React frontend interfaces, and Kubernetes infrastructure, ensuring our systems operate reliably in production with minimal need for intervention. Collaborating closely with the engineering lead, you will help scale our lab automation platform in response to increasing instrument counts and experimental throughput.
You will excel in this role if you possess the following experience:
- Development of production MES, LIMS, ERP, or process control systems adhering to strict correctness standards.
- Expertise in workflow and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) orchestration.
- Proficient data modeling for audit and provenance applications.
- Experience in managing concurrent systems, including resource locking, scheduling, and contention resolution.
- Background in powder synthesis, ceramics, or materials manufacturing environments.
- Familiarity with scheduling algorithms for managing shared resources under constraints.
- Knowledge of event sourcing or append-only data architectures.
