USD per year
Overview
About Periodic Labs
Periodic Labs is an AI + physical sciences lab building state-of-the-art models to make novel scientific discoveries. The company is well funded and growing rapidly. Team members are owners who identify and solve problems without boundaries or bureaucracy. They eagerly learn new tools and new science to push forward their mission.
About the Role (Lead Security Engineer)
The Lead Security Engineer will lead, design, build, and operate security engineering at Periodic Labs. The role involves securing systems that power research and operations, including cloud environments, clusters, internal developer platforms, identity systems, secrets, SaaS access patterns, and lab-adjacent infrastructure. The engineer will work closely with research, infrastructure, lab, and operations teams to reduce risk without slowing down experimentation. This is a hands-on engineering role involving writing automation, shipping controls, leading incident response, and raising the bar for secure system design. The engineer will set pragmatic standards and build tooling that makes the secure path the easy path for the company.
Key Responsibilities
- Own security architecture across cloud, Kubernetes, internal services, and research infrastructure.
- Design and operate identity and access systems (SSO, MFA, RBAC, SCIM lifecycle automation, workload identity).
- Build and improve secrets management (KMS, GitHub/CI credentials, 1Password or equivalent).
- Harden software delivery and developer workflows (CI/CD security, dependency security).
- Lead threat modeling, secure design reviews, risk assessments.
- Build detection and response capabilities; lead incident containment and remediation.
- Manage vulnerability management and remediation automation.
- Partner on segmentation, remote access, firewall policy, certificates, DNS.
- Set pragmatic security standards; run tabletop exercises; help company make sound security decisions without unnecessary process.
Desired Experience
- Building/operating security controls in AWS/GCP/Azure and Kubernetes.
- Hands-on engineering with scripting languages (Python/Bash) and Terraform.
- Identity systems like Okta/Entra/SAML/OIDC/SCIM/IAM/workload identity.
- Secrets management including KMS/CI/CD secrets/GitHub OIDC/service-to-service auth.
- Secure SDLC/supply chain controls: code review/threat modeling/dependency management/signed builds/CI hardening.
- Detection/response/vulnerability management/incident handling in fast-moving environments.
- Linux/network security fundamentals: segmentation/certificates/DNS/firewalls/VPNs/service-to-service auth.
- Working with researchers/platform teams balancing security and velocity.
- Clear communication and strong judgment for cross-functional security work.
Additional Strong Candidate Qualifications
- Experience securing AI/ML/research infrastructure.
- Experience securing mixed on-prem/cloud environments including lab-adjacent or physical device integration.
- Experience with runtime security/eBPF/admission control/policy-as-code.
- Experience translating customer or enterprise security requirements into practical engineering controls.
Periodic Labs aims to create an AI scientist and autonomous laboratories for them to operate, focusing on accelerating science in the physical sciences. They build AI scientists and autonomous labs to generate high-quality experimental data, enabling new scientific discoveries and applications such as discovering higher-temperature superconductors and aiding semiconductor manufacturers.
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