Discovery Portfolio Manager

About the role

Physical Superintelligence is an exceptionally well-funded seed-stage startup with roots at Google, Meta, DeepMind, NVIDIA, Citadel, Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins, the Perimeter Institute, and the Institute for Advanced Study, 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.

Our platform runs discovery campaigns against open problems in physics. Those campaigns produce results, and someone has to decide what happens to them. That turns out to be harder than it sounds. A result you put in a paper may be a result you have given away. A result you put in a patent is one you cannot talk about for a year and a half. Plenty of results that look like breakthroughs have no patentable subject matter in them at all, and telling those apart quickly is most of the skill.

We need someone who owns the portfolio of problems we point the platform at, sets the bar a result has to clear before anyone outside the building sees it, and works out — case by case — whether it should become a publication, a filing, a trade secret, or open source. The final call on the genuinely hard ones sits with a standing committee. The recommendation, the reasoning, the record, and the follow-through are yours. You are not the physicist on these results and you are not the lawyer on these filings. You are the person who turns what the platform produces into assets that last, instead of a pile of interesting outputs.

Responsibilities

• Point the platform at the right problems. Map the landscape of open physics problems our system can actually reach and decide where to spend campaign time. Run the cycle of cheap broad probes to find fertile ground, then concentrate effort where the ground turns out to be fertile, then kill what is not converting. Balance scientific and commercial value, making trade-offs in front of stakeholders who care deeply about both. Defend the portfolio as a live allocation decision, not a wish list.
• Decide what happens to what comes out. Route results based on a written rule set that handles recurring patterns, ensuring only genuinely novel cases go to the committee. Assess whether results contain eligible subject matter, whether competitors could reverse-engineer them, whether prior contracts dictate outcomes, and whether infringement could realistically be detected and pursued. Enforce the rule that filings come before disclosure, as most of the world grants no grace period and early preprints can forfeit international rights.
• Get results validated, then get them published. Build and maintain a bench of outside experts across relevant physics subfields whose review carries weight. Establish infrastructure for safe review, including NDAs, export screening, conflict screening, and protocols to prevent inventive contributions from clouding title. Manage submissions to strong venues, handling referees and revisions. Publication is how the field learns to take us seriously, and you are accountable for the machine’s outputs, not for being on the byline.
• Build the IP pipeline. Stand up disclosure intake, triage, and filing cadence. Direct outside counsel on strategy and priority during drafting and prosecution. Keep the portfolio aligned with where value is captured, not where papers are easiest. Maintain boundaries against open-source releases and ensure the portfolio is investor-ready for technical diligence. Document contributions to meet USPTO requirements, ensuring the record is built into campaigns from the start to avoid ending up with papers and no patents.

Requirements

• Real technical depth in physics or an adjacent field. Ability to read a campaign output and judge whether it is real, novel, and significant. Ability to hold your own with our research team. A PhD is common but not the only path; a serious research career or years of hands-on technical work close to the physics can suffice. Cannot require results to be explained before classifying them.
• Technology transfer and IP management background. Experience running the path from result to filing to publication with real stakes. Knowledge or technology transfer at a national lab, research institution, or university office; in-house IP strategy at a deep tech company; or managing a prosecution docket and outside counsel. Advising from the outside is not equivalent.
• Portfolio judgment. Experience running a research program with real prioritization and kill mechanisms under budget and time constraints. Ability to articulate why something was shut down while still interesting.
• A network, not a Rolodex. Standing relationships with credible people across several physics subfields. Ability to distinguish who is worth listening to from who is merely loud. Ability to assess whether a result contains eligible subject matter or is a law of nature in disguise. Experience winning arguments with scientists who believe their discoveries are patentable.
• The nerve to hold a line you cannot enforce by title. Experience holding firm on decisions despite reasonable pressure from all directions. Leverage comes from rule sets and credibility, not seniority. Ability to hold a line without damaging relationships.
• Clear eyes about AI-generated science. Understanding of where these systems produce insight versus plausible nonsense. Treats verification as the critical step separating the two. Unimpressed by the platform until it earns trust.

Nice to Have

• Editorial or program committee experience at a major venue.
• Experience with export control compliance and sensitive technology research and development.
• Named inventor on issued patents.
• Familiarity with the commercial domains we work in: compute infrastructure (on the ground and in orbit), energy, and sensing and instrumentation.

How We Work

• Engineering-led. Engineers own problems end-to-end, from spec to ship to on-call.
• Contracts before logic, testing against real systems instead of mocks, and favoring simple designs that ship over clever ones that don’t.
• Development and discovery processes are AI-native: instrumented, agent-augmented, and measured.
• Public Benefit Corporation with an academic grants program. The public benefit commitment is a live input into decisions this role handles, and you should expect to argue about it.

Location and Compensation

This role is based in Boston and is on-site at our Cambridge hub. We offer competitive compensation including salary, benefits, and meaningful early-stage equity. Compensation is evaluated based on judgment, what you have built, and the leverage you create.

This role involves access to controlled unclassified technical data, and some responsibilities are subject to U.S. export control regulations. We will discuss any resulting requirements transparently during the process.