Intern, Technical High School Year Round - Counter-Autonomy and Machine Learning, Onsite

What Your Job Will Be Like

We are seeking a Technical High School Intern for a year-round position in our Counter-Autonomy and Intrusion Detection department. Daily activities will involve working with staff members and technologists to support multiple projects requiring algorithm development and programming. This involves set up of equipment and sensors for tests and experiments, data collection, data labeling, and data curation for machine learning projects.

The successful candidate must be willing to learn a variety of topics in the domain of physical security, computer science, robotics, computer engineering, and data science.

• Perform entry-level work within a mentored research and development and engineering environment working in conjunction with Sandia staff on projects that involve a variety of disciplines.
• Support projects in the fundamentals of science and engineering applied to physical security.
• Assist in the application of engineering principles and methods to develop or demonstrate new designs, concepts, materials, machines, products, processes, or systems.
• Learn the fundamentals of computer science, programming, and machine learning, while also assisting in the development of data collection software stacks.
• Assist in maintaining and debugging multi-language software projects and working within Git repositories.
• Learn concepts of machine learning and data science and assist staff in developing and training machine learning algorithms.
• Write up summaries of your work and present and discuss it with your mentor.

At Sandia, we value the important work done by our interns and its contribution to National Security. Because of this, our interns earn competitive pay rates. Our pay structure is based on earned credit hours, classification, and degree level. Your pay rate will be determined during the hire process and included in your offer package. You can view the Intern Pay Rate chart here.

You bring the confidence and skills to be eligible for the job by meeting these minimum requirements:

• Attending a local high school
• Enrolled full time, as defined by the school
• Minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0/4.0
• Ability to work up to 25 hours per week during the academic year, and up to 40 hours per week during the summer
• Minimum 16 years of age
• U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, asylees or refugees in the U.S.

• Self-starter and willing to learn new skills in a team environment
• Good oral and written communication skills
• A high GPA
• General knowledge and understanding of a suite of software, such as Microsoft Office
• Ability to work at least 5 hours per week onsite at Sandia National Laboratories during the school year, with exceptions for academic deadlines / needs
• Ability to work up to 40 hours per week during the summer or school breaks
• Basic programming familiarity or willingness to learn (e.g., Python, C, C++, Matlab, Java, or similar)
• Willingness to work outdoors during summers assisting in field testing and data collection activities under supervision of lab staff
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills
• Familiarity with Git version control
• Experience designing software programs, UML diagramming, and object-oriented design principles.
• A technical hobby outside of school, such as building and flying drones, mechatronics, building computer networks, building single-board computer systems, and 3D printing

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.

The Mission of dept 6554 is to counter evolving autonomous threats and improve the performance of physical security systems. We conduct research, development, testing, and evaluation of components and technologies to advance the science of physical security. This enables customers to mitigate threats to nuclear materials and other high value targets by improving the ability to sense, assess, track, and respond to physical intrusions.

Our work addresses current physical security operational challenges and evolving threats such as unmanned systems, including unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). We are assisting NNSA in implementing unmanned systems into their operations. We specialize in the testing of Counter-UAS (C-UAS) systems and technologies, which counter the danger posed by UAS, and we are the C-UAS test agent for DOE, NNSA, and DHS.

We leverage innovations from industry, related laboratory-directed R&D, novel signature collection and processing techniques, and partnerships across the laboratory to address real-world problems. We are creating software solutions to implement and deploy the results of our work across the NNSA physical security enterprise.

Sandia National Laboratories is the nation's premier science and engineering lab for national security and technology innovation, with teams of specialists focused on…