Data Scientist

The Rice University Department of Computer Science and Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering are seeking a Data Scientist to build and operate the data infrastructure for READINESS, a new $20 million NSF-funded project transforming four materials synthesis systems (CVD, thermal, PVD, and plasma CVD reactors for 2D materials, oxides, and diamond films) into an AI-driven, remotely accessible autonomous laboratory.

The READINESS facility will generate substantial and diverse data, including growth recipes, reactor time-series, user interactions, optical, SEM/TEM and AFM images, spectra, and continuous robot telemetry. The Data Scientist will be responsible for developing and maintaining the central data lake that captures, indexes, secures, and serves this information across the project.

The position combines data engineering and analysis, including deploying an S3-compatible object store, developing ingestion connectors for live instruments and robot controllers, and establishing SQL and vector-search capabilities under Rice single sign-on. The role will also compute embeddings over images and spectra, develop retrieval and similarity-search services, and build AI agents capable of answering researchers' questions directly from the data.

Reporting to the faculty leads of the READINESS Data Infrastructure working group, the Data Scientist will collaborate closely with the synthesis platform teams, robotics and AI/digital-twin working groups, Rice IT and Informat