Senior/Principal Data Scientist- Artificial Intelligence, CA/NM- Hybrid

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.

Sandia's artificial intelligence (AI) team is building the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) next-generation AI Platform, an integrated scientific AI capability that delivers rapid, high-impact solutions for national security, science, and applied energy missions. The Platform is based on three pillars: Models, Infrastructure, and Data. You will join the Data Pillar team to design, implement, and operate Sandia's AI-ready, zero-trust data ecosystem. Your work will transform raw simulation outputs, sensor and facility logs, experimental records, and production data into governed, provenance-tracked, and access-controlled datasets that power AI models, autonomous agents, and mission workflows across DOE's HPC, cloud, and edge environments.

We anticipate multiple hires for the Data Pillar that collectively span the set of responsibilities and skills described below. Likewise, new hires will be expected to work in conjunction with existing Sandia staff and teams from other DOE laboratories to deliver on this ambitious, fast-paced project. Importantly, we anticipate that while AI Platform development will leverage existing AI and data science tools extensively, success will also require considerable innovation and problem solving to address the unique needs of DOE applications. If this sounds like an exciting challenge to you, we look forward to reading your application!

Key Responsibilities:

• Build and operate an AI-Ready Lakehouse
  • Design and maintain a federated data lakehouse with full provenance/versioning, attribute-based access control, license/consent automation, and agent telemetry services
  • Implement automated, AI-mediated ingestion pipelines for heterogeneous sources (HPC simulation outputs, experimental instruments, robotics, sensor streams, satellite imagery, production logs).
• Enforce Data Security & Assurance
  • Develop a Data Health & Threat program: dataset fingerprinting, watermarking, poisoning/anomaly detection, red-team sampling, and reproducible training manifests
  • Configure secure enclaves and egress processes for CUI, Restricted Data, and other sensitive corpora with attestation and differential-privacy where required
• Define and Implement Data Governance
  • Establish FAIR-compliant metadata standards, data catalogs, and controlled-vocabulary ontologies
  • Automate lineage tracking, quality checks, schema validation, and leak controls at record-level granularity
• Instrument AI Workflows with Standardized Telemetry
  
  • Deploy Agent Trace Schema (ATS) and Agent Run Record (ARR) frameworks to log tool calls, decision graphs, human hand-offs, and environment observations
  • Treat agent-generated artifacts (plans, memory, configurations) as first-class data objects
    
• Collaborate Across Pillars
  • Work with Models and Interfaces teams to integrate data services into training, evaluation, and inference pipelines
  • Partner with Infrastructure engineers to optimize data movement, tiered storage, and high-bandwidth networking (ESnet) between HPC, cloud, and edge
  • Engage domain scientists and mission leads for agile deterrence, energy grid, and critical minerals use cases to curate problem-specific datasets
• Support Continuous Acquisition & Benchmarking
  • Design edge-to-scale data acquisition systems with robotics and instrument integration
  • Develop data/AI benchmarks: datasets, tools, and metrics for pipeline performance, model evaluation, and mission KPIs

On any given day, you may be called upon to:

• Author an AI-mediated parser for a new experimental instrument, automatically extracting and cataloging metadata
• Implement an attribute-based policy that blocks unapproved data combinations in a classified enclave
• Prototype a streaming pipeline that feeds live sensor data from a nuclear facility into an HPC training queue
• Develop a dashboard that alerts on data drift, pipeline failures, or anomalous records
• Collaborate with MLOps engineers to version datasets alongside model artifacts in CI/CD

You will be part of a multi-disciplinary, mission-focused team delivering foundational data capabilities for transformative AI systems in national security, energy, and critical materials. Occasional travel may be required. If you are passionate about building the data backbone for next-generation AI at scale, we want to hear from you.

The selected applicant can work a combination of onsite and offsite work. The selected applicant must live within a reasonable distance for commuting to the assigned work location when necessary.

$114,000 - $227,500

*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.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, or a related STEM field, plus five (5) years of directly relevant experience, or an equivalent combination of education and experience
• Ability to acquire and maintain a DOE Q clearance

The ideal R&D S&E Data Scientist candidate for Sandia National Laboratories will in addition possess the following:

• Graduate degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) with a significant data research component where an independent research project was a graduation requirement (e.g., independent project, thesis, or dissertation).
• Experience in developing software for enterprise and national security applications.
• Experience acquiring, preparing, and analyzing real world data
• 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, guiding technical decisions and mentoring junior staff.

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

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

• Graduate degree in Data Science, Informatics, Statistics, or a related STEM field with a significant data research component
• Background in AI-mediated data curation: automated annotation, feature extraction, and dataset certification
• Hands-on knowledge of data security and zero-trust principles, including secure enclaves, attribute-based access control, and data masking or differential privacy
• Familiarity with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data practices
• Curating and managing scientific or engineering datasets
• Data architecture for HPC and edge-computing environments
• Advanced data fusion techniques for heterogeneous and streaming data sources
• Building data pipelines for feature stores, experiment tracking, and model drift monitoring
• Designing and enforcing data policies for classified, export-controlled, or proprietary data
• Collaborating on publicprivate partnerships or multi-lab federated data efforts
• Demonstrated expertise in building and maintaining production data pipelines (ETL/ELT) and data warehouses or data lakes
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, SQL, and experience with frameworks like Apache Spark or Dask
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)

The Computational Science Department performs leading-edge software development and technical analysis through physics-based modeling and simulation, using our applications expertise as 'power users' to guide software development at Sandia's Center for Computing Research. Our goal is to establish first-of-a-kind uses of this software in diverse applications of national importance, ranging from nuclear stockpile stewardship to global climate modelling, and spanning multiple disciplines of the physical sciences and engineering. As both developers and analysts, we act as a bridge to set a standard for computational simulation for the broader user community and to incorporate critical feedback from users for continuous improvements in our software development activities and products.

This posting will be open for application submissions for a minimum of seven (7) 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.