---
title: 'Head of People at Periodic Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-people-periodic-labs-menlo-park-5n8dyr2jhzga'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-14'
---

# Head of People at Periodic Labs

- **Company:** Periodic Labs
- **Location:** Menlo Park, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/periodic-labs/c398af52-085d-427c-8c0f-8537cfd96ff3

## Job description

## About Periodic Labs

We're an AI and physical sciences company building state-of-the-art models to accelerate breakthroughs across materials, energy, and beyond. Backed by world-class investors and growing rapidly, we operate at the pace the frontier requires. Our team brings deep expertise, genuine ownership, and an insatiable drive to push the boundaries of what's scientifically possible.

## About the Role

Periodic Labs is growing fast, and we're building the people infrastructure to match. As our Head of People, you'll run the full people function and partner directly with the leadership team to build the organization that will define the next era of AI-driven scientific discovery. You'll design the systems, shape the culture, and lead the people and talent functions that make Periodic Labs a place where exceptional people do the best work of their lives. This isn't a traditional HR leadership role. We need someone who has operated inside engineering-forward organizations, ideally in frontier AI, physical products, semiconductors, or hardware-forward startups, and who deeply understands how technical teams operate under pressure. You'll be a trusted advisor to founders and senior leaders, bringing both strategic vision and operational rigor.

## What You'll Do

- Run all things people related, spanning talent, HR business partnering, onboarding, performance, compensation, learning and development.
- Lead and scale talent acquisition, including building the recruiting team, evolving hiring processes and infrastructure, and shaping the company’s hiring strategy as it grows.
- Partner directly with the leadership team on organizational design, workforce planning, and growth strategy as the company grows through its next phase
- Lead employee relations work with professionalism and sound judgment, handling sensitive situations, investigations, and executive coaching with discretion and care
- Design the people systems that help our scientific and engineering teams grow, get recognized, and get paid fairly, built for how technical people actually work, not borrowed from a playbook.
- Design onboarding programs that integrate new engineers and scientists quickly into the Periodic Labs culture and way of working
- Shape how we scale as an organization. This isn't a traditional hierarchy-building exercise, it's figuring out how a lab-first company adds people and structure without losing what makes it work.
- Use people data and analytics to surface insights and drive evidence-based decisions on headcount, attrition, engagement, and team effectiveness

You Will Thrive in This Role If You Have

- 15+ years of HR experience, with meaningful time in a senior people leadership role at a technology, research, or engineering-forward company
- Experience building and leading a talent acquisition function, including hiring and managing recruiters, as the company scales
- A background supporting teams in physical products, semiconductors, manufacturing, or hardware-forward startups. You understand the operational rhythms and talent profiles of these environments
- Experience navigating the intersection of research and engineering cultures, where intellectual rigor, speed, and hands-on problem-solving coexist
- Strong command of the full HR spectrum: performance management, compensation design, employee relations, organizational design, and people operations
- A builder's mindset. You're comfortable in ambiguous environments where people programs are still being defined and you'll often have to create the playbook from scratch
- High EQ and communication skills. You build trust quickly with engineers and scientists, and you know how to navigate difficult conversations with directness and care
- Sound judgment on sensitive matters. You handle employee relations and investigations with appropriate seriousness and discretion
- Data fluency: you use people analytics to diagnose issues, identify trends, and support decisions with evidence

Especially Strong Candidates May Also Have

- Experience at an AI lab, deep tech company, or research institution where the talent profile is unusually specialized
- Familiarity with compensation design for rare technical roles, such as physicists, materials scientists, and ML researchers, where standard benchmarks don't apply
- Experience scaling an HR function through a growth financing event or rapid headcount expansion
- A background in operations, finance, or program management that brings additional analytical depth to the people function
- Direct experience owning technical hiring strategy, including sourcing for niche scientific or engineering disciplines

Mechanics

- Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or similar experience
- Location: Menlo Park, CA
- Compensation: $350,000-$450,000 + equity
- Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas

## About Periodic Labs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Periodic Labs is building AI scientists and autonomous laboratories to accelerate scientific discovery in the physical sciences, starting with materials design and semiconductor research.
- **Entity Type**: Private (seed-stage, $300M total funding raised in 2025)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (primary) and Menlo Park, California, USA (dual locations) [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/periodic-labs), [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/periodic-labs)
- **Founded**: 2025 [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/periodic-labs)
- **Founders**: Ekin Dogus Cubuk (Co-Founder) and other undisclosed founding team members with backgrounds at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/periodic-labs), [periodic.com](https://periodic.com/)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Physical sciences R&D, artificial intelligence, autonomous laboratory systems
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises in semiconductor manufacturing, materials science, energy, and other deep-tech sectors requiring experimental research
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Our goal is to create an AI scientist” that can autonomously hypothesize, run experiments, and learn from results to discover new materials and accelerate technological progress [periodic.com](https://periodic.com/)

## Products & Services
- **AI Scientist**: A suite of AI models trained to generate hypotheses, design experiments, and interpret results across physical science domains.
- **Autonomous Laboratories**: Fully automated, high-throughput experimental platforms that produce large volumes of high-quality data (including negative results) to train AI models. [periodic.com](https://periodic.com/)
- **Custom Agents for Industry**: Tailored AI agents for engineers and researchers, e.g., helping a semiconductor manufacturer analyze heat dissipation data to accelerate iteration. [periodic.com](https://periodic.com/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private seed-stage company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $300M in a single seed round (2025) [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/periodic-labs)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: a16z, Felicis, DST, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture arm), Accel, Emerson Collective, Fellows Fund, Coatue; individual backers include Jeff Bezos, Elad Gil, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Dean. Also collaborating with academic advisors from Stanford, Northwestern, and more. [periodic.com](https://periodic.com/), [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/periodic-labs)
- **Growth Signals**: 40 employees as of mid-2026, with monthly headcount growth of +19.6% and 25 active job postings (+47.1% quarterly growth) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/periodic-labs)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary data generation**: Autonomous labs produce massive, unique datasets (including valuable negative results) that do not exist in public literature, creating a data moat.
- **Founding team pedigree**: Core team co-created ChatGPT, DeepMind’s GNoME, OpenAI’s Operator (Agent), MatterGen, and scaled autonomous physics labs – rare concentration of AI + science talent. [periodic.com](https://periodic.com/)
- **End-to-end integration**: AI models, simulation, and physical experimentation are all in-house, enabling rapid closed-loop learning.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale autonomous labs**: Expand capacity to generate experimental data across multiple physical science domains.
- **Target high-impact problems**: Superconductor discovery, semiconductor heat dissipation, and other materials challenges that can unlock Moore’s Law, advanced energy grids, and space travel. [periodic.com](https://periodic.com/)
- **Develop the first generation of AI scientists**: Train models that can operate independently of human input across the entire scientific method.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “From bits to atoms” – a deep-tech startup blending frontier AI with hands-on lab work. Emphasis on rapid iteration and real-world impact.
- **Work policy**: In-office preferred; primary offices in Menlo Park and San Francisco, CA. Most roles are on-site. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/periodic-labs)
- **Notable perks**: Work alongside world-class AI researchers and experimental scientists; access to cutting-edge automated lab equipment; early-stage equity and high-growth trajectory.
- **Engineering culture**: 34% of employees are in technical roles; talent sourced from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, and Stanford – strong peer learning environment. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/periodic-labs)

## Sources
1. [periodic.com](https://periodic.com/)
2. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/periodic-labs)
3. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/periodic-labs)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/periodic-labs)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/periodic-labs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/periodic-labs)

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