Research Scientist, Scaling RL
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 a drive to push the boundaries of what's scientifically possible.
About the Role
We're training frontier models to develop deep scientific knowledge and reasoning for scientific tasks. You’ll study how RL scales with training compute, develop better algorithms, and take ideas from controlled experiments to our largest runs like Periodic Neon.
What You'll Do
Design experiments to understand how RL performance scales with compute, model size, data, and reward quality, building on work such as ScaleRL
Develop better RL algorithms, spanning policy optimization, advantage estimation, exploration, and credit assignment for long-horizon RL tasks
