XRD Facility Manager
AI research and deployment company building AI scientists and autonomous laboratories for physical-science discovery.
About Periodic Labs
Periodic Labs develops specialized AI models and high-throughput autonomous labs that run and analyze physical experiments, initially for materials discovery including superconductors, magnets, and semiconductor applications.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will manage an X-ray diffraction facility with multiple diffractometers for powder, thin-film, and capillary measurements. You will align, calibrate, maintain, repair, and commission instruments; establish measurement standards and quality control; support difficult measurements; train and certify users; maintain documentation and structured metadata; and oversee radiation safety compliance.
Requirements
- 5+ years of hands-on experience operating and maintaining X-ray diffractometers.
- Strong XRD experience across powder, thin-film, and capillary or transmission work.
- Proficiency in phase identification, Rietveld refinement, and quantitative analysis.
- Experience maintaining several instruments, ideally from more than one vendor.
- Ability to troubleshoot hardware and determine when repair or external service is needed.
- Careful documentation and metadata practices.
- Ability to support many users in a busy lab while maintaining good practice.
- PhD in materials science, physics, chemistry, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Responsibilities
- Align, calibrate, and control configuration and uptime of facility instruments.
- Maintain reference standards and a regular quality-control schedule.
- Perform and support difficult measurements involving non-routine geometries, weakly scattering or air-sensitive samples, thin films, and non-ambient stages.
- Troubleshoot, maintain, and repair instruments; coordinate service contracts and vendor visits.
- Commission new instruments through site preparation, acceptance testing, and comparison against existing instruments.
- Train and certify scientists and technicians, review early runs, and provide support.
- Maintain SOPs, measurement recipes, and data-reduction conventions.
- Ensure raw data, instrument state, calibration status, and sample metadata are consistently recorded in a structured format.
- Manage X-ray equipment registration, compliance, interlock testing, surveys, and compressed gas and cryogen handling.
Benefits
- Equity
- Visa sponsorship available for exceptional candidates