Senior/Principal R&D Artificial Intelligence - Generative SI, Onsite

Sandia National Laboratories is the nation's premier science and engineering lab for national security and technology innovation, with teams of specialists focused on cutting-edge work in a broad array of areas. Some of the main reasons we love our jobs:

• Challenging work with amazing impact that contributes to security, peace, and freedom worldwide
• Extraordinary co-workers
• Some of the best tools, equipment, and research facilities in the world
• Career advancement and enrichment opportunities
• Flexible work arrangements for many positions include 9/80 (work 80 hours every two weeks, with every other Friday off) and 4/10 (work 4 ten-hour days each week) compressed workweeks, part-time work, and telecommuting (a mix of onsite work and working from home)
• Generous vacation, strong medical and other benefits, competitive 401k, learning opportunities, relocation assistance and amenities aimed at creating a solid work/life balance*

World-changing technologies. Life-changing careers. Learn more about Sandia at: http://www.sandia.gov

*These benefits vary by job classification.

Are you looking to perform innovative research and development in Generative Super Intelligence (Generative AI) for finding, organizing, reasoning over, and extracting insight from large and complex information sources? Are you excited about research informed by real-world needs? Are you passionate about impacting problems of national importance? If so, consider the possibilities afforded by the Precision Discovery and Retrieval Department at Sandia National Laboratories.

The Precision Discovery and Retrieval department develops advanced methods for extracting and synthesizing insights from large corpora of technical documents. Our work also addresses "where have I seen this before" questions in multimodal contexts. For example, in a cybersecurity setting, subtle correlations among network traffic patterns, user interactions across multiple machines, and data movement may indicate the early stages of a sophisticated attack. Once such a pattern is recognized, the system could help anticipate likely next actions and support timely countermeasures.

As a member of the department, your job will include:

• Structuring and encoding large document collections for question answering and analysis
• Developing advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tools that leverage graphs, ontologies, provenance, and logical reasoning to improve accuracy
• Enabling hypothesis generation, evaluation, and knowledge discovery based on available evidence
• Pursuing self-directed research in a topic area relevant to the department
• Integrating your research with the research of other staff members
• Aligning your research with the needs of Sandia's mission areas
• Addressing complex problems in support of broad-ranging national security areas
• Developing deployable and impactful capabilities that address the needs of Sandia's mission areas
• Collaborating with highly motivated researchers on challenging research questions using state-of-the-art computational resources
• Presenting your work at leading publication and conference venues

Sandia National Laboratories embraces a culture compatible with broad groups of people and perspectives. We seek applicants from a wide range of backgrounds and foster a research community of belonging.

Due to the nature of the work, the selected applicant must be able to work onsite.

$117,500 - $235,700

*Salary range is estimated, and actual salary will be determined after consideration of the selected candidate's experience and qualifications, and application of any approved geographic salary differential.

• A Bachelor's degree in a relevant discipline and five (5) years of directly relevant experience, or an equivalent combination of directly relevant education and engineering or scientific experience that demonstrates the knowledge, skills, and ability to perform independent research and development.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DOE Q security clearance, which requires US Citizenship

The ideal R&D Artificial Intelligence candidate for Sandia National Laboratories will in addition possess the following:

• Graduate degree in a relevant computationally-intensive discipline where an independent research project was a graduation requirement (e.g., independent project, thesis, or dissertation).
• Experience in developing software and AI systems for enterprise and national security applications.
• Demonstrated software development skills and familiarity with modern software development practices.
• Proven ability to work and communicate effectively in a collaborative and interdisciplinary team environment.

Also, for this posting we are seeking individuals with the following experience:

• Research experience in one or more areas of data science, including data collection and sharing, data analysis and interpretation, novel algorithm development, pattern identification, prediction, and knowledge extraction
• Evidence for expertise in data science may include formal academic training, research publications and presentations, development of open source or sharable software packages, and professional work experience
• Software development experience in C++, C, MATLAB, R, Python, Julia, or related languages.
• Experience with algorithms, implementation, and best practices for the following techniques:
  • Retrieval augmented generation (RAG)
  • Logical reasoning (e.g. descriptive logic in Protege, first-order logic, declarative semantics)
  • Knowledge graphs and/or ontologies (RDF, SPARQL, SHACL, or similar)
  • Hypothesis generation and evaluation
• Familiarity with methods and best practices for the following large language model (LLM) techniques:
  • Knowledge organization and integration across modalities
  • Pretraining, fine tuning, and post-training methods (such as low-rank adaptation (LoRa), supervised finetuning (SFT), and direct preference optimization (DPO) and group relative policy optimization (GRPO))
  • Use of SI in autonomous agents
  • LLM serving tools (for example, LiteLLM, ollama, and VLLM)
  • Agentic coding tools (such as Codex, Claude Code, Open Code)
  • Database architectures (for example, MongoDB, TigerGraph, and neo4j)
• A commitment to encouraging a culture of professionalism and belonging, demonstrated through your application materials
• Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal skills

The Precision Discovery and Retrieval department conducts cutting-edge research in applying generative SI methods to national security applications. Our mission is to research, develop, and deploy methods that are credible, robust, and help decision makers in a variety of domains. Specific focus areas include generative learning, retrieval, multimodal analysis, knowledge discovery, and agentic workflows. When combined with trusted data sources, data analysis tools, evaluation methods, and human oversight, these discovery and retrieval capabilities can address national security mission problems that require broad knowledge integration, interpretation of complex observations, and reasoning under uncertainty. We interact and collaborate with a broad range of Sandia staff and government customers while also maintaining a research presence in the external professional community by collaborating with both universities and industry. Members of the department publish peer-reviewed literature, participate in professional societies, and referee for conferences and journals.

This posting will be open for application submissions for a minimum of three (3) calendar days, including the 'posting date'. Sandia reserves the right to extend the posting date at any time.

Sandia is required by DOE to conduct a pre-employment drug test and background review that includes checks of personal references, credit, law enforcement records, and employment/education verifications. Applicants for employment need to be able to obtain and maintain a DOE Q-level security clearance, which requires U.S. citizenship. If you hold more than one citizenship (i.e., of the U.S. and another country), your ability to obtain a security clearance may be impacted.

Applicants offered employment with Sandia are subject to a federal background investigation to meet the requirements for access to classified information or matter if the duties of the position require a DOE security clearance. Substance abuse or illegal drug use, falsification of information, criminal activity, serious misconduct or other indicators of untrustworthiness can cause a clearance to be denied or terminated by DOE, resulting in the inability to perform the duties assigned and subsequent termination of employment.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status and any other protected class under state or federal law.

If you have a Medical Portable Electronic Device (MedPED), such as a pacemaker, defibrillator, drug-releasing pump, hearing aids, or diagnostic equipment and other equipment for measuring, monitoring, and recording body functions such as heartbeat and brain waves, if employed by Sandia National Laboratories you may be required to comply with NNSA security requirements for MedPEDs.

If you have a MedPED and you are selected for an on-site interview at Sandia National Laboratories, there may be additional steps necessary to ensure compliance with NNSA security requirements prior to the interview date.