What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Engineer (AI for Chemistry & Materials) position at Optagon Labs?
Founding Engineer - AI Research
Optagon Labs is building frontier algorithms for machine reasoning in chemistry and materials design.
The physical world is governed by extraordinarily complex design spaces. Every industrial product - from polymers to food systems, advanced materials, and chemical formulations emerges from navigating millions of interacting variables, constraints, and tradeoffs.
Today, discovering better products still relies largely on human intuition, fragmented scientific knowledge, and expensive trial-and-error experimentation.
We believe this is one of the most important unsolved problems in artificial intelligence.
Our mission is to build computational systems capable of reasoning across these scientific search spaces and expanding humanity’s ability to invent.
We are hiring a founding engineer to help build these systems.
What You’ll Work On
You will work directly with the founders on frontier research problems at the intersection of:
- Statistical Optimization
- Scientific knowledge Representation
- Search and Reasoning Architectures
- Novel Approaches to Statistical Optimization Under Sparse Data Spaces
Our work involves building entirely new algorithmic systems for navigating high-dimensional scientific design spaces where existing AI approaches break down.
This is research-heavy engineering. You will spend your time designing algorithms, running experiments, building novel architectures, and solving problems where no strong solution exists.
Who We’re Looking For
We care less about credentials and more about exceptional ability.
- Think deeply from first principles
- Have strong intuition for mathematics and algorithms
- Enjoy working on difficult open-ended technical problems
- Learn fast and operate well in highly ambiguous environments
- Want to work on genuinely hard problems rather than incremental software
Strong backgrounds include:
- Machine Learning Research
- Applied Mathematics
- Optimization Theory
- Probabilistic Modeling
- Scientific Computing
- Physics, Chemistry, or Engineering
What Makes This Different
This is not a traditional software engineering role.
You will not be building APIs, dashboards, or enterprise infrastructure.
You will work on frontier AI research with direct real-world deployment in industrial environments from day one.
You will help define the technical foundations of the company at its earliest stage.
We are building in an exceptionally difficult domain and solving problems few teams in the world are attempting.
We are looking for unusually capable people who want to build something technically ambitious enough to matter.
If building frontier AI systems for scientific discovery sounds exciting to you, reach out directly.