Founding AI Engineer — Physics AI, Agentic Systems & Full-Stack
Company: Elucida Labs, Inc.
Location: San Jose, CA
Type: Full-time
Posted: 2026-10-22
About this role
About Elucida Labs
Elucida Labs is building the autonomous
AI Scientist for Semiconductor Manufacturing
.
Advanced wafer fabrication, spanning thin-film deposition (ALD, CVD, PVD), plasma etch (RIE, ALE), CMP, and advanced packaging, is bottlenecked by brutal multi-month empirical trial-and-error cycles. We build intelligent software that eliminates months of guesswork and trial-and-error in semiconductor manufacturing.
Backed by top founders and mentors (Stanford StartX F26), we partner directly with semiconductor equipment OEMs, microelectronics research institutes, and Fabs. As a Founding AI Engineer, you will own the technical architecture from core scientific models to live customer deployments.
The Role
We are seeking an exceptional, high-agency
Founding AI Engineer
who thrives at the intersection of deep scientific modeling, autonomous agentic architectures, and rapid production full-stack engineering.
We operate with extreme engineering leverage: our team heavily uses agentic developer tooling, including Claude Code, Cursor, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—to ship robust, production-grade systems at 10x startup velocity. You will bridge physical process models and large-scale autonomous LLM agents, write full-stack code, and deploy directly into active customer pilots with process engineers.
Key Responsibilities
1. Physics AI & Scientific Machine Learning
- Design and implement Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), neural operators (FNOs, DeepONets), and surrogate models to simulate plasma dynamics, chemical kinetics, thermal budgets, and material interfaces.
- Build active learning and Bayesian optimization pipelines to recommend optimal recipe parameters (gas flow, RF power, pressure, temperature profiles) under sparse, high-cost experimental constraints.
- Ingest and featurize complex, multimodal semiconductor fab telemetry: optical emission spectroscopy (OES), residual gas analysis (RGA), in-situ metrology, and w...