Process Engineer, Thin Films

Periodic Labs•Menlo Park, CA

21h•$45 - $65•Onsite

About The Position

Periodic Labs is building an autonomous laboratory for high-throughput materials discovery, combining advanced chemistry, robotics, automation, AI, and materials science. This role focuses on operating and maintaining a dedicated thin-film lab in Menlo Park, which includes a suite of deposition and characterization tools. The Process Technician will be responsible for day-to-day tool operation, sample preparation, and first-line maintenance to ensure high throughput and low variance in experimental data. This is a contract position, on-site, with the possibility of extension or conversion as the lab scales.

Requirements

3+ years of hands-on experience operating thin-film deposition and/or metrology equipment in a semiconductor fab, R&D line, or equipment supplier environment.
Working knowledge of at least one deposition technique at a practical level (e.g., understanding bad pump-downs, source conditioning, off-rate issues).
Sample prep skill with delicate materials, including dicing or cleaving, mounting, cross-sectioning, and cleaning without introducing artifacts.
Comfort with basic metrology data, such as reading thickness maps, sanity-checking film measurements, and spotting delamination or particles in images.
Mechanical aptitude and hands-on maintenance instinct, with comfort working inside chambers and with fittings and fasteners.
Rigorous documentation habits and attention to detail.
Cleanroom experience and respect for protocol, chemical safety, and contamination control.
Ability to work independently, prioritize requests, and escalate anomalies early.

Nice To Haves

Associate degree or technical certificate in a related field, or equivalent military or industry training.
Experience in a high-mix, low-volume R&D environment.
Vacuum system troubleshooting, RF matching and plasma tuning, or mass flow and pressure control calibration.
Experience with LIMS, MES, or other systems for tracking samples, runs, and characterization results.
Wafer-level metrology experience (thickness and resistivity mapping, stress and warpage).
Familiarity with in-situ or real-time process monitoring during deposition.
Prior work at university nanofabrication facilities or shared cleanrooms.

Responsibilities

Run deposition tools to SOP, executing recipes on vacuum-based thin-film deposition systems, loading and unloading, verifying chamber state and process conditions, confirming the run matched setpoints, and logging the result.
Prepare samples by dicing and cleaving coupons from full wafers, handling mounting and cross-section prep for imaging, and cleaning and prepping substrates per workflow-specific recipes (wet cleans, oxide strip, dehydration bake, substrate and source conditioning).
Operate characterization tools to collect and log structural, optical, and electrical film data, recognizing when a scan, fit, or image indicates a tool problem rather than a material result, and escalating appropriately.
Perform first-line and preventive maintenance, including chamber opens and cleans, source and consumable changes, shield and liner swaps, pump-down and leak checks, calibration checks, and PM scheduling, working with vendors and facilities on service visits and maintaining complete maintenance history.
Keep the tools qualified by running qual and monitor samples on a set cadence, tracking thickness, uniformity, and rate against baseline, flagging drift early, and maintaining SPC-style charts where they exist and helping build them where they don't.
Support non-standard work requests from engineers, such as unusual stacks, off-recipe parameter sweeps, new substrate geometries, or unproven prep sequences, by scoping tool capabilities, executing the work, and documenting the actual outcome.
Document everything, recording actions taken rather than just the recipe, capturing failures and fixes alongside successes, and meeting the metadata standards for the data pipeline.
Own lab safety and housekeeping, including chemical handling and waste, gas and precursor changes, lockout/tagout, cleanroom protocol and gowning discipline, and spares and consumables inventory.