Senior/Staff Scientist - Algorithms & Data Products

In this role you will

• Design and build algorithms that map multi‑modal sensor data (optical emission spectra, electrical signals, thermal/other sensors, process context) into robust “material fingerprints” and properties.
• Work with systems, plasma, and applications engineers to marry hardware and software: designing and automating experiment protocols for our benchtop, inline roll‑to‑roll, and robotic piece‑to‑piece platforms.
• Shape our first generation of models and metrics for battery electrodes and ceramic barrier coatings, directly influencing what customers see and trust.

This is a high‑impact, hands‑on R&D role at the core of SirenOpt’s technology stack, shaping how we design, run, and learn from our experiments.

What You'll Do

• Own end to end modeling pipelines from raw sensor data to customer facing metrics and alerts.
• Develop multi modal representations of plasma-material interactions that generalize across different materials, geometries, and processes.
• Design and implement automated experimental protocols (parameter sweeps, DOE campaigns, calibration routines) that coordinate plasma hardware, motion/robotics, sensing, and data capture.
• Work with embedded, controls, and software engineers to design deployment architectures across edge devices, host controllers, and cloud systems.
• Define performance metrics, validation strategies, and monitoring for models running in benchtop products and pilot manufacturing lines.
• Own the trustworthiness of our data – interrogate raw and derived data for instrument artifacts, drift and silent pipeline failures, and build the checks that catch a bad result before it reaches a model, a customer metric, a disclosure, or a paper.

• Advanced degree (PhD or MS with substantial experience) in a quantitative field such as physics, applied mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, computer science, or similar, with a strong focus on data analysis and modeling.
• 6+ years of hands on experience (industry or postdoc) building models for real world sensor or process data, not just web/NLP/recommender systems.
• A track record of catching problems in data that others missed – artifacts, drift, miscalibration, or a pipeline quietly producing plausible nonsense.
• Strong Python skills and experience with scientific computing/ML tooling (NumPy, SciPy, pandas, scikit learn; familiarity with PyTorch or similar is a plus).
• Demonstrated ability to design and execute end to end analysis workflows: data ingestion and cleaning, feature engineering, model training, validation, and reporting.
• Experience with at least one of: spectroscopy, imaging, time series/multivariate process data, or other high dimensional measurement modalities.
• Solid grounding in statistics (hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, experimental design, control charts, etc.) and comfort reasoning about uncertainty and robustness.
• Experience designing or implementing automated experimental workflows or test rigs that integrate hardware and software (e.g., lab automation, instrument control, hardware in the loop setups, industrial test stands).
• Proven ability to communicate technical results clearly, in writing and in person, to both technical and non technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable working in lab and/or industrial environments: dealing with noisy data, incomplete logging, and partially instrumented systems.

• Comfort working with hardware APIs (e.g., vendor SDKs, REST/gRPC services, serial/fieldbus interfaces) from Python or similar, and reasoning about timing, synchronization, and error handling.
• Experience with multi‑modal data fusion (combining spectral, imaging, and process data) or related techniques in domains such as autonomous systems, medical imaging, or industrial inspection.
• Background in plasma physics, optical diagnostics, materials science, or related fields - or strong interest and ability to learn these areas quickly.
• Experience deploying models into edge or real‑time systems with latency and reliability constraints.
• Familiarity with lab automation or experiment orchestration tools (e.g., custom Python control scripts, LabVIEW, PLC/SCADA, or equivalent), and interest in building lightweight, code‑driven alternatives.
• Experience with experiment tracking, MLOps, or data‑centric tooling (e.g., MLFlow, Weights & Biases, DVC) and modern software engineering practices (Git, code reviews, CI/CD).
• Prior work with battery manufacturing, roll‑to‑roll processes, or high‑temperature coatings (e.g., turbine components) is a strong plus.

Location: On-Site (San Leandro, CA)

Job Type: Full-Time

Role Overview

We’re looking for a Senior Scientist, Algorithms & Data Products to join our core R&D team, working at the heart of our manufacturing intelligence platform – not in a commercial analytics role. You’ll turn rich plasma sensor signals into trusted metrics and models and to build the automation that powers our next generation of experiments.

Base Pay Range

$140,000—$190,000 USD

Benefits

• Equity and Salary compensation depends on experience
• Health, Dental, Vision plans provided
• 401k matching provided
• Time off: 20 days of PTO per year, plus approximately 15 paid US holidays per year

At SirenOpt®, we are building the manufacturing intelligence layer for advanced materials. We help manufacturers visualize, understand, and control the material behavior that determines yield, performance, and safety across energy, aerospace, automotive, electronics, and semiconductor applications.

We are working on this problem because advanced materials are becoming more critical and more complex, but the tools used to manufacture them have not kept pace. Manufacturers still lack real-time visibility into the small variations that shape quality on the line. We care because those invisible variations cause scrap, waste energy and materials, create higher costs, inconsistent product performance, and introduce avoidable safety risks.

We developed PlasmaSens™, our manufacturing intelligence platform, to close that visibility gap and to lay the foundation for truly autonomous manufacturing.

We are uniquely suited to solve this problem because our expertise and our platform connect material science, plasma physics, machine learning, and manufacturing in one system. The same core technology works in-line, at-line, and off-line, and across form factors ranging from electrodes and wafers to 3D components. That flexibility lets us meet manufacturers where they are and carry insight from the lab into mass production.

We have deployed multiple PlasmaSens products with customers and collaborators across the United States, Japan, Germany, and Taiwan. We pair that real-world experience with support from leading US, European, and Japanese venture investors, the National Science Foundation, the California Energy Commission, and the Department of Energy. Our combination of differentiated technology, manufacturing experience, and global scientific and industry partnerships gives us the foundation to solve material variability at scale.