---
title: 'Procurement & Finance Operations Manager at Periodic Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/procurement-finance-operations-manager-periodic-labs-menlo-park-11a6rdvpesfa'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Procurement & Finance Operations Manager at Periodic Labs

- **Company:** Periodic Labs
- **Location:** Menlo Park, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-05-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/periodic-labs/e58cc4ac-39a8-4f46-a660-4cab443922cc

## 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

We are seeking a highly analytical, systems-oriented Procurement & Finance Operations Manager to own procurement, inventory strategy, operational finance, and purchasing systems across our laboratory and R&D environments. This role sits at the intersection of scientific operations and finance. You will help build the operational infrastructure required to scale experimentation volume dramatically while maintaining financial discipline, inventory reliability, and operational efficiency. You will own the full lifecycle of lab procurement and financial operations — from vendor management and inventory forecasting to purchase order workflows, budgeting, spend analytics, and experiment cost modeling. A key responsibility of this role will be developing systems and processes that enable the company to understand and optimize the true cost of experimentation across materials, compute, capital equipment, and operational overhead. This is not a traditional procurement role. We are looking for someone who can think deeply about operational systems, financial rigor, automation opportunities, and scalable workflows in a rapidly evolving technical environment.

## What You’ll Do

- Own purchasing operations across lab consumables, specialty materials, gases, chemicals, equipment, and operational supplies
- Develop inventory forecasting systems and consumption tracking processes to prevent stockouts and support rapidly scaling experimental throughput
- Build systems to analyze and track the true cost of scientific experiments across materials, compute, equipment utilization, and operational overhead
- Own purchase order generation, invoice reconciliation, and three-way matching workflows across procurement and accounting processes
- Track operational and capital expenditures against budgets and support forecasting, reporting, and cost optimization initiatives
- Design and implement scalable procurement, inventory, and operational finance systems as the organization grows
- Improve workflows through automation, tooling, inventory tracking systems, dashboards, and process optimization initiatives
- Partner closely with scientists, engineers, lab operations, finance, and leadership teams to support evolving experimental needs
- Manage supplier and vendor relationships, including pricing negotiations, lead times, and purchasing agreements
- Identify operational bottlenecks and help build the infrastructure and processes required to scale high-throughput R&D environments

Especially Strong Candidates May Also Have

- Experience in advanced materials, hardware, robotics, biotech, semiconductor, or scientific lab environments
- Experience building procurement or inventory systems from scratch
- Experience implementing inventory tracking systems (QR/barcode workflows, inventory software, etc.)
- Experience with operational finance, manufacturing finance, or COGS analysis
- Experience supporting high-throughput R&D or experimental environments
- Familiarity with automation workflows, reporting systems, or operational tooling
- Basic financial modeling and analytics skills

## Qualifications

- 5+ years of experience in procurement, operational finance, lab operations, supply chain, or related operational roles
- Experience supporting technical, scientific, manufacturing, hardware, or R&D environments
- Strong understanding of budgeting, forecasting, spend tracking, and operational analytics
- Experience owning procurement workflows, purchasing operations, and vendor management
- Experience with PO, accounting, and spend management systems (e.g., Ramp, QuickBooks, NetSuite, SAP, Coupa, Quartzy, etc.)
- Strong systems-thinking mindset with demonstrated process improvement experience
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-changing startup environments
- Highly organized with exceptional attention to detail
- Strong cross-functional communication skills and ability to work closely with technical teams

Mechanics Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or similar experience Location: Menlo Park, CA Compensation: $225,000-$275,000 base salary + 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)

## Other roles at Periodic Labs

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- [Process Safety Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/process-safety-engineer-periodic-labs-menlo-park-kzcpxh3d9mg6) — Menlo Park, CA
- [Controller](https://feeny.ai/job/controller-periodic-labs-menlo-park-y8xmsezeq3ch) — Menlo Park, CA
- [Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/automation-engineer-periodic-labs-menlo-park-e7a6p1rtctm5) — Menlo Park, CA
- [Research Scientist, Scaling RL](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-scaling-rl-periodic-labs-menlo-park-g9s9gctkbnjs) — Menlo Park, CA / Montréal, Canada
- [Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Midtraining](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-research-engineer-midtraining-periodic-labs-menlo-park-gh5qfkb8vxth) — Menlo Park, CA
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