Business Operations (AI)

Location: On-site in Menlo Park, California or Montreal, Canada; San Francisco planned soon

Compensation: $250,000–$300,000 annually plus equity

Company

Periodic Labs is an AI and physical sciences company building advanced models to accelerate breakthroughs in materials, energy, and related scientific fields.

What you will do

• Support research planning cycles, milestone tracking, experiment prioritization, and coordination between AI and physical sciences teams.
• Build systems that provide leadership with visibility into research progress, resource utilization, risks, and model and laboratory roadmaps.
• Translate scientific goals into operating plans, resourcing decisions, hiring priorities, and product implications.
• Coordinate compute, laboratory equipment, and infrastructure allocation across research projects.
• Drive product planning, roadmap development, prioritization frameworks, and scalable product-science collaboration processes.
• Lead evaluations, benchmark development, strategic analyses, partnerships, and customer engagements connecting research with commercial outcomes.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in physics, chemistry, materials science, computational science, engineering, or a related quantitative discipline.
• 4+ years of experience in strategy, operations, product management, chief-of-staff, or a related function, including work in a technical, research-driven, or AI organization.
• Ability to engage with primary scientific literature and technical discussions in AI and physical science, translating findings into operational decisions.
• Strong analytical, structured-thinking, communication, judgment, and cross-functional influence skills.
• Experience designing planning and prioritization systems for exploratory, uncertain, high-stakes work.
• Visa sponsorship is available.

Nice to have

• PhD and research experience in molecular simulation, condensed matter, materials informatics, or a related field.
• Research operations, technical program management, or science strategy experience at an AI lab, national lab, or research-intensive technology company.
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML workflows, model evaluation, or AI product development.
• Experience bridging scientific and commercial functions or scaling operational functions from scratch.

Culture & Benefits

• High-ownership work at the intersection of frontier AI and physical science.
• Opportunity to collaborate with researchers, scientists, engineers, founders, product leads, and external partners.
• Work focused on accelerating scientific discovery and translating research into real-world outcomes.
• Equity included in the compensation package.