Head of Physics

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.

Role

We are seeking a Head of Physics to lead the fundamental physicists, theorists and experimentalists, who run our research programs on open problems, and to scale AI-driven physics discovery beyond what any individual scientist can carry.

Responsibilities

• Lead Physics, the organization that runs research programs on open problems in fundamental physics and supplies the verified problem sets the rest of the company depends on: own the people, the portfolio and the hiring.

• Run research programs at scale: staffing, pace, rigor, and the discipline to stop projects that are not converging.

• Own verification: set the standard that separates a genuine result from a plausible artifact, and make sure nothing leaves the building that has not met it.

• Own the path from result to publication, including external expert verification before release; partner with Core AI on evaluation and with Applied AI when a customer needs a physicist's judgment.

• Stay technical: carry individual scientific work and set the bar for rigor in person.

What We're Looking For

• Eight or more years of physics research work and at least three years of direct people management, hiring, performance reviews, and career development for the people who reported to you, 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.

• You can referee outside your own field. You can read an unfamiliar proof, numerical result, or experimental analysis, find the step that does not hold, and say so before it reaches a journal. You separate what you can judge from what you cannot, know who to call, and set the conditions under which you would override them.

• A research record the field takes seriously: publications in top-tier journals, cited and externally validated, in one area of theoretical or experimental physics, with the breadth to supervise work outside your specialty:

  • Quantum theory, many-body and condensed matter.

  • Statistical mechanics and complex systems.

  • Atomic, molecular and optical.

  • High energy, particle and nuclear.

  • Gravity and cosmology.

  • Mathematical physics.

Motivation is assessed at the first conversation: why this rather than a professorship or a national lab group, and what you want that neither gives you.

Nice to Have

• A PhD in physics.

• Fluency at the physics-ML intersection: you can reason about what an AI system is doing and design a verification process around it.

• Experience running distributed or multi-team physics research programs.

• Hands-on work with AI for science: benchmarks, verification systems, computer-assisted proof, or AI-driven discovery.

• A track record recruiting exceptional physicists, including from academia into industry.

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 role is hybrid, three days a week in person in our Cambridge, MA office. 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.