Early Career R&D Agentic AI Systems Engineer, 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.

We are seeking a R&D S&E Artificial Intelligence Engineer to provide systems engineering for Agentic AI systems. On any given day, you may be called on to partner with a cross-functional team to:

• Design, develop, and optimize agent and multi-agent AI tooling and workflows against technical goals, domain context and operating environment, and success metrics. 
• Define and apply an agentic system's development lifecycle, including requirements, analysis, architecture design, model and agent selection, tool integration, testing, deployment, and continuous improvement.
• Work with researchers in other sciences at the lab (e.g., statisticians, mathematicians, computer scientists, etc.) to develop evaluation frameworks to measure and communicate system reliability, trustworthiness, safety, accuracy, and national security impact. 
• Build automated evaluation and regression-testing pipelines for prompts, tools, models, workflows, and emergent agent behaviors.
• Integrate agent capabilities with tools, APIs, orchestration frameworks, and agent architectures.
• Establish and operate LLMOps/AgentOps practices including CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, telemetry, cost tracking, and incident response for AI agents in production.
• Deploy and scale agent AI capabilities across the laboratory and customer implementations.
• Continuously evaluate new models, frameworks, architectures, and methodologies, and translate relevant advances to improve system quality and performance.
• Work with human systems integration teams to ensure efficacy of overall agentic system; assess human-agent team performance, including whether users can effectively understand, supervise, collaborate with, and accomplish their work through the system.

Due to the nature of the work, the selected applicant will be required to work onsite. Relocation can be provided for those that qualify.

$102,400 - $199,700

*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, 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 and SCI clearance.

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:

• Working understanding of generative AI methods such as diffusion models, large language models (LLMs), or Variational Autoencoders (VAEs).
• Solid understanding of LLM mechanics: context windows, tokenization, prompt engineering.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: e.g., Python, API design, async programming, testing/debugging distributed systems.
• Familiarity with tool-use/function-calling patterns - how models decide when and how to invoke external tools.
• Experience designing agent loops: plan, act, observe, reflect cycles.
• Knowledge of orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or building custom orchestration).
• Tool/function schema design (clear, unambiguous tool definitions the model can reliably call).
• Knowledge of vector databases or retrieval systems.
• Security awareness - prompt injection, tool permission scoping, sandboxing untrusted agent actions.
• Experience designing, building, and implementing agent and multiagent architectures or planning/reasoning systems.
• Experience with high-performance computing (HPC) or cloud-based ML development (e.g., Slurm, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP).
• Has curiosity about AI applications and enjoys learning about AI applications in free time.
• Experience working with multidisciplinary teams.
• Ability to work collaboratively in multi-disciplinary environments
• Evidence of leadership potential through mentoring, collaboration, or open-source contributions.
• Strong analytical, written, and verbal communication skills

Our team brings together expertise in agentic development and deployment, human factors, cognitive psychology, statistics, and UX design, to pair technical development capability with an understanding of how people interpret, trust, and use AI. 

We research, prototype, and deploy agent and multi-agent AI workflows to support tasks ranging from routine operational processes to complex analytical tasks. Our efforts result in the creation of custom agentic tooling, new orchestration strategies, interaction patterns, evaluation methods, and safety controls that turn innovative ideas into robust, reusable components that are production-ready for high-consequence national security missions. 

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 and SCI access, both of which require US citizenship. SCI access may also require a polygraph examination. If you hold more than one citizenship (i.e., of the U.S. and another country), your ability to obtain these levels of access 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 the 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.