Head of Physics

Job description

OVERVIEW Physical Superintelligence is a startup with roots at Google, NVIDIA, Harvard, Meta, MIT, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Cambridge, and the Perimeter Institute building AI systems to discover new physics at scale. Our mission is to discover and commercialize transformative physics breakthroughs at scale with artificial superintelligence, safely, verifiably, and for broad public benefit. The last century's golden age of physics gave us transistors, lasers, and nuclear energy. We believe artificial superintelligence will unlock the next one. We're creating the infrastructure to industrialize scientific discovery and usher in this new era. We have one product: new physics, at scale. We are seeking a Head of Physics to lead the physicists who run our physics research programs and to scale AI-driven physics discovery beyond what any individual scientist can carry. ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES - Physics is the organization responsible for running frontier physics research programs and for the scientific assets the rest of the company depends on: verified problem sets, evaluation and verification support for AI training, and simulation integration. Physics makes physics legible to AI systems and AI output trustworthy to physicists. - Lead the organization. Own the people, the execution of the physics research portfolio, and its delivery on the platform. - Run physics research programs at scale. Own execution across the portfolio: staffing, pace, rigor, and the discipline to stop projects that are not converging. - Partner with Core AI on evaluation and verification for AI training, and with Applied AI, feeding domain expertise into customer-facing work: validating models, challenging assumptions, and standing behind results. Rely on Engineering for the platform your team's work runs on. - Own the pipeline from result to publication, including staged release and external expert verification where appropriate. - Stay technical. This is a player-coach role: carry individual scientific work and set the bar for rigor in person. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - A PhD in physics and a physics research record the field takes seriously: published, cited, externally validated work in at least one domain, with the breadth to supervise work outside your specialty. - At least three years of direct people management: hiring, performance reviews, and career development for the people who reported to you. - Experience leading physicists in a commercial or industrial environment: a physics research group, a lab team, or an industrial physics research organization, with evidence the group produced more and better science under you. - Real fluency at the physics-ML intersection. You do not need to be an ML researcher, but you can reason about what an AI system is doing, design a verification process that distinguishes insight from artifact, and hold your own with AI researchers. - Production sensibility. You know the difference between a prototype and a system, and you hold a team to the latter. - Comfort operating alongside strong scientific leadership elsewhere in the company. This job attracts someone who wants to build and run the best physics organization in industry. NICE TO HAVE - Experience running distributed or multi-team physics research programs (large collaborations, national lab programs, or comparable). - Hands-on work with AI for science: benchmarks, verification systems, ML-accelerated simulation, or AI-driven discovery. - Track record recruiting exceptional physicists, including from academia into industry. - Experience with staged or embargoed release of high-stakes scientific results. HOW WE WORK We hold a high technical bar and give people full ownership of their work, from spec to ship to on-call. We write contracts before logic, test against real systems instead of mocks, and favor simple designs that ship over clever ones that do not. Our development process is AI-native: we work with agentic coding tools daily, write specs that are legible to humans and agents alike, and lead with leverage. LOCATION AND COMPENSATION This is an in-person role based in Boston. We offer competitive compensation including salary, benefits, and meaningful early-stage equity. We evaluate on scientific depth, leadership track record, rigor, and shipping velocity. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diverse perspectives in attacking hard problems in science.