Research Scientist, Photonic Materials Discovery (AI)

Location: Cambridge, MA, USA

Expected base salary: $176,000–$304,000 USD per year. Bonus potential and early-stage equity are also available.

Company

hirify.global is building AI systems and proprietary instruments designed to automate the scientific method and accelerate discovery across materials, medicine, and energy.

What you will do

• Lead computational discovery of materials for electro-optic and integrated photonic applications.
• Develop and validate DFT, first-principles, atomistic, and multiscale workflows for electronic, vibrational, dielectric, optical, and electro-optic properties.
• Study the effects of composition, structure, defects, interfaces, strain, temperature, and processing conditions on material performance.
• Connect intrinsic material properties to device requirements such as optical loss, modulation efficiency, operating wavelength, and fabrication compatibility.
• Compare simulations with experimental measurements, investigate discrepancies, and prioritize candidates for experimental evaluation.
• Build reproducible high-throughput and agentic workflows that orchestrate simulation codes, databases, analysis tools, and surrogate models.

Requirements

• PhD or equivalent experience in physics, materials science, chemistry, electrical engineering, or a related field.
• Strong background in computational condensed-matter physics, materials science, physical chemistry, or a related discipline.
• Expertise in electronic-structure methods and response-property calculations using perturbative, finite-field, Berry-phase, or comparable approaches.
• Knowledge of crystallographic symmetry, electronic structure, lattice dynamics, light–matter interaction, and structure–property relationships.
• Experience with electronic-structure packages, reproducible HPC or cloud workflows, scheduling, data management, and automated analysis.
• Strong Python and scientific software skills, plus familiarity with agentic AI, tool-calling, or scientific workflow orchestration.

Nice to have

• Experience with ferroelectrics, semiconductors, oxides, nitrides, chalcogenides, or low-dimensional materials.
• Experience with advanced electronic-structure, excited-state, finite-temperature, molecular-dynamics, or effective-Hamiltonian methods.
• Experience modeling defects, surfaces, interfaces, thin films, strain, or other non-ideal effects and connecting atomistic results to device models.
• Experience with high-throughput workflows, materials data systems, surrogate models, active learning, or AI/ML for computational materials science.
• Experience designing evaluation, observability, error recovery, provenance, and human oversight for agent-driven workflows.

Culture & Benefits

• Work at the intersection of condensed-matter physics, materials chemistry, photonics, and AI-enabled discovery.
• Collaborate with experimental scientists, ML researchers, and software engineers.
• U.S. full-time employees receive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• Benefits include flexible time off, company-wide holidays, paid parental leave, educational assistance, commuter benefits, and a subsidized lunch program.
• Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive regionally tailored benefits; international salaries follow local market rates.