Founding Scientist

Medra•San Francisco, CA

57d•Onsite

About The Position

What We're Building: We have been quietly building the foundational layers of our Physical AI Scientist platform: 🤖 Physical AI that can operate scientific instruments with human-level dexterity. 🧪 Scientific AI that can analyze results, reason about next steps, and close the loop autonomously. This is an incredibly ambitious mission, but we believe that a team of ambitious people with high ownership can accomplish incredible things. The Team: We’re a team of passionate, mission-driven engineers from companies like Tesla, Amazon, SpaceX, and Neuralink. We’re collaborative and love moving fast, both with our product and on team trips skiing or go-karting! As a team, we love nerding out about engineering and robotics — plus other topics like race cars or cooking. We like learning new things and then sharing our new knowledge with each other. Our team is opinionated and straightforward. We don’t mind intense discussions about design tradeoffs. If we have arguments or miscommunication, we resolve conflicts quickly and empathetically.

Requirements

Proven ability to think strategically, solve complex problems creatively, and communicate effectively with diverse stakeholders, including scientists and senior executives
A willingness to wear many hats / a flexible attitude towards responsibilities and scope
Entrepreneurial drive and a desire to have broad ownership, operating with significant autonomy akin to a startup CSO
MS or PhD in Materials Science, Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, or related field

Responsibilities

Partner with diverse scientific groups to design and launch Medra Labs 1
Work with our customers to understand their science and help accelerate their pace of discovery
Drive the creative process to uncover novel opportunities in instrumentation, workflow design, and system integrations.
Build and test early hardware and software prototypes that translate ideas into working solutions.
Evolve validated prototypes into robust, production-grade systems that enable fully autonomous experimentation.
Clearly document and share progress at every stage—from initial concepts to detailed design, testing, and final integration.