Member of Technical Staff — Research, Physics

Causal Labs • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

Our mission is general causal intelligence; AI that is capable of (1) predicting the future and (2) identifying the actions to alter it. To achieve this breakthrough, we are building a Large Physics foundation Model (LPM) because physical systems, unlike text or images, are governed by verifiable cause and effect. We believe that scaling on physics will enable an understanding of causality required to predict and control physical systems, starting with weather. Our founding team has built and deployed AI against the physical world in robotics, drug discovery, and particle physics at institutions like DeepMind, Waymo, Cruise, Insitro, Nabla Bio, and CERN. We look for domain experts who are excited to tackle unsolved problems. Our thesis is that scaling on physics yields a model capable of understanding the causal structure to predict and alter the future. Your mission is to ensure the model evolves towards this thesis: grounded in physical law, evaluated against it, and ready to generalize across domains.

Requirements

• Deep expertise in physics — fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, computational physics, or a closely related field (typically a PhD or equivalent research experience)
• Familiarity with numerical simulation of physical systems (e.g. CFD) and its trade-offs
• Interest in where machine learning and physical modeling meet
• Ability to collaborate closely with ML researchers and translate physical principles into technical requirements
• A rigorous, evidence-driven approach to evaluating model quality

Nice To Haves

• We value a relentless approach to problem-solving, rapid execution, and the ability to quickly learn in unfamiliar domains.

Responsibilities

• Bring physical principles to bear on the model — assessing consistency with conservation laws and physical constraints, and where physics-informed inductive biases help or hinder
• Develop evaluations that test whether the model's behavior is physically coherent, not just statistically accurate
• Advise on the physics of the systems we model, from fluid dynamics to thermodynamics, and their numerical treatment
• Investigate where the LPM generalizes across physical domains and where it breaks down
• Partner with model, evaluation, and interpretability teams to connect physical understanding to research direction

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree