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.

About the role

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.

Requirements

• 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.

Qualifications

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.
• 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).
• 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.

About Our Team

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.

Pay

Salary Range $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.

Benefits

• 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

These benefits vary by job classification.