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
You will lead, design, build, and operate security engineering at Periodic Labs. You will secure the systems that power our research and operations, including authentication, cloud environments, clusters, internal developer platforms, identity systems, secrets, SaaS access patterns, and lab-adjacent infrastructure. You will work closely with research, infra, lab, and operations teams to reduce risk without slowing down experimentation.
This is a hands-on engineering role. You will write automation, ship controls, lead incident response, and raise the bar for how we design secure systems. You will set pragmatic standards and build tooling that makes the secure path the easy path for the rest of the company.
What You’ll Do
Own security architecture across cloud, Kubernetes, internal services, and research infrastructure
Design and operate identity and access systems for both people and workloads, including SSO, MFA, RBAC, SCIM lifecycle automation, workload identity, and least-privilege access patterns
Build and improve secrets management across the company, including KMS, GitHub and CI credentials, 1Password or equivalent systems, and secure service-to-service authentication
Harden software delivery and developer workflows, including CI/CD, dependency security, build provenance, artifact integrity, and secure GitHub administration
Lead threat modeling, secure design reviews, and risk assessments for internal platforms, lab systems, and any externally exposed products
Build detection and response capabilities across cloud, identity, network, and endpoint telemetry, and drive incidents through containment, root cause analysis, and remediation
Own vulnerability management and remediation automation across hosts, containers, dependencies, SaaS, and infrastructure-as-code
Partner with infra and lab engineering on segmentation, remote access, firewall policy, certificates, DNS, and secure device-to-cloud patterns
Set pragmatic security standards, run tabletop exercises, and help the rest of the company make sound security decisions without adding unnecessary process
You Will Thrive in This Role If You Have
5+ years of security experience
Experience building and operating security controls in AWS, GCP, or Azure and in Kubernetes-based environments
Strong hands-on engineering with a scripting language such as Python or Bash, and Terraform
Experience with identity systems such as Okta or Entra, SAML, OIDC, SCIM, IAM, workload identity, and least-privilege design
Experience with secrets management and secure credential flows, including KMS, CI/CD secrets, GitHub OIDC, or service-to-service authentication
Familiarity with secure SDLC and supply chain controls, including code review, threat modeling, dependency management, signed builds or attestations, and CI hardening
Experience with detection and response, vulnerability management, and incident handling in fast-moving engineering environments
Strong Linux and network security fundamentals, including segmentation, certificates, DNS, firewalls, VPNs or Tailscale, and service-to-service auth
Experience working with researchers or platform teams where the goal is to find the optimal point in the security/velocity tradeoff
Clear communication, strong judgment, and the ability to drive cross-functional security work
Especially Strong Candidates May Also Have
Experience securing AI, ML, or research infrastructure
Experience securing mixed on-prem and cloud environments, including lab-adjacent systems or physical device integration
Experience with runtime security, eBPF, admission control, or policy-as-code
Experience translating customer or enterprise security requirements into practical engineering controls
Mechanics
Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or similar experience
Location: Menlo Park (Soon: San Francisco, too)
Compensation: $250,000-350,000 + equity
Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas and will do everything we can to assist in this process with our legal support.
We’re building a team of the world’s best — the scientists, engineers, and problem-solvers who don’t just follow the frontier, they define it. If you’re driven to bring AI to life in the physical world and make discoveries that have never been made before, you belong here.