Research Scientist, Data

Periodic Labs

$250K — $350K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience building large-scale data pipelines for LLM pretraining or midtraining.
  • Expertise in data quality techniques and systems for deduplication, filtering, and normalization.
  • Background in handling diverse scientific data formats for model consumption.
  • Proficiency with distributed data processing frameworks like Apache Spark or Dask.
  • Strong Python engineering skills for production-quality tooling in research.
  • Experience evaluating and sourcing third-party datasets, considering licensing and quality.
  • Ability to collaborate directly with ML researchers to translate data needs.

Responsibilities

  • Own and drive data strategy across training stacks, collaborating with research leads.
  • Source and procure external datasets from various scientific domains.
  • Build and maintain data pipelines for large-scale data ingestion and processing.
  • Design systems to enhance data quality through deduplication and normalization.
  • Integrate experimental data into training stacks efficiently.
  • Develop tools for researchers to query and understand their data.
  • Implement metadata tracking for reproducibility and auditing of experiments.

Benefits

  • Flexible working locations near Menlo Park or San Francisco.
  • Visa sponsorship provided with legal support for international candidates.
Full Job Description
About the Role

You will work on the most important aspect of Scientific AI creation: evaluations and data. This means constructing cutting-edge evaluations based on advanced scientific use cases, sourcing and procuring external datasets, integrating internally generated experimental data into the training stack, constructing training environments for RL. You'll ensure that the team always has the right assets, in the right shape, to evaluate and improve AI models.

You will work with computational and experimental scientists to translate complex scientific workflows into rigorous evaluations and agentic benchmarks, and partner with pretraining, midtraining, and reinforcement learning researchers to identify the data models needed, then build the datasets, environments, and pipelines to deliver it. Your goal will be to create a tight feedback loop between scientific use cases, model evaluation, and training data.

What You'll Do
  • Own the evaluation and data strategy across the training stack, identifying capability gaps and shaping the roadmap with leads of physical science and AI research
  • Work with domain experts to translate advanced scientific workflows into rigorous evals, benchmarks, and RL environments
  • Source, evaluate, and procure external datasets across chemistry, physics, materials science, mathematics, simulations, and laboratory instrumentation
  • Build robust pipelines to ingest, clean, and transform for training large-scale datasets from heterogeneous sources
  • Build tooling and analysis workflows that help researchers inspect data, understand model failures, and determine which evaluations or datasets to develop next
You Will Thrive in This Role If You Have
  • Designed evaluations, benchmarks, or RL environments for language models, agents, or scientific AI systems
  • Built large-scale data pipelines for LLM pretraining, midtraining, post-training, or evaluation
  • Strong judgment about dataset and evaluation quality, including scientific relevance, coverage, provenance, licensing, and contamination risks
  • Strong software and data engineering skills, including familiarity with data processing at scale, dataset versioning, lineage tracking
  • A research-oriented mindset: you form hypotheses about data, run controlled experiments, measure model outcomes, and iterate with rigor


Mechanics

Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or similar experience

Location: Menlo Park, CA or Montreal, Canada. (Soon: San Francisco, too)

Compensation: $250,000-350,000 + equity

Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas.

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Periodic Labs

More Information Technology Jobs

Find similar Research Scientist, Data jobs: