Early Career, Computer Science - Software Simulation and Analysis, Onsite

What Your Job Will Be Like

Are you excited about using state-of-the-art technologies while also maintaining and modernizing legacy systems that are critical to national security? Join our dynamic Sandia team, where you'll tackle a mix of innovative and longstanding challenges across the full software stack.

Typical responsibilities (you may work on any of these on a given day):

• Agile development of new software for high-fidelity modeling, simulation, and machine learning surrogates; leverage networked compute servers or HPC resources as needed.
• Maintain, extend, and refactor legacy codebases (e.g., Fortran, C, legacy C++, MATLAB, or other older languages) to keep existing models operational and performant.
• Translate/modernize older models to newer languages or frameworks (e.g., moving Fortran physics models to Python/C++/GPU-accelerated libraries).
• Collaborate with architects, developers, technical leads, customers, and end-users to gather requirements, design solutions, and deliver extensible, well documented software.
• Contribute to missions that span signal & image processing, physics, analytics, cloud computing, machine learning, modeling & simulation, service oriented architectures, microservices, big-data management, visualization, and pattern recognition.
• Provide model and system level expertise to users, programs, and partners, acting as a trusted technical resource.
• Develop proposals and lead funded efforts for both current challenges and emerging needs.
• Participate in leadership development activities (independent projects, mentorship, cross team initiatives).

Why Join Us?

• Impactful work that directly supports national security.
• Opportunities to lead and shape cutting-edge R&D while preserving essential legacy capabilities.
• A collaborative environment that values continuous learning, innovation, and career growth.

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

Qualifications We Require

• 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 clearance.

Qualifications We Desire

• Graduate degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in Computer Science or a highly related field, with an independent research component (thesis/dissertation).
• Proven software development expertise across the full lifecycle, including modern practices (Agile, CI/CD, version control).
• Experience modernizing legacy code and modernizing scientific models to newer languages or platforms.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills; ability to work effectively in multidisciplinary teams.
• Passion for continual learning and expanding technical skillsets.

Additional Experience We're Looking For

• Development Process - Full software lifecycle using Agile, Scrum, or Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).
• Legacy Systems - Maintenance, debugging, and migration of code written in Fortran, legacy C/C++, MATLAB, or similar environments.
• Cloud & Containerization - AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, or comparable cloud-native platforms.
• Data Processing & Analytics - Design and implementation of critical data-processing pipelines and analysis tools.
• Problem Solving - Strong analytical, creative, and troubleshooting abilities.
• Communication - Excellent presentation, documentation, and stakeholder-engagement skills.
• Team Collaboration - Ability to operate both independently and within large, multi-disciplinary teams.
• Prioritization - Proven track-record of juggling competing priorities and delivering on schedule.
• Customer Focus - Proactive, "can-do" attitude with a focus on responsive, high-quality support.
• Mission Knowledge - Familiarity with the USNDS mission, including ground and flight systems (beneficial but not required).

About Our Team

The Software Simulation and Analysis department performs research and development to advance flexible, extensible, and robust large-scale software applications for remote sensing system-level simulation as well as real-time remote sensing ground station data processing that transform data to knowledge enabling our customers to take action with confidence.