Principal & Data Architect

Position: Principal Knowledge & Data Architect
Primary Work Address: 4000 Jones Bridge Road, Chevy Chase, MD, 20815

HHMI is focused on supporting and moving science forward in a variety of different ways ranging from conducting basic biomedical research, empowering educators, inspiring students, developing the next generation of scientists – even stretching into film and media production. Our Headquarters is in the greater Washington, DC metro area and is home to over 300 employees with expertise in investments, communications, digital production, biomedical sciences, and everything in between.

The work housed here supports and augments the groundbreaking research conducted in HHMI labs across the nation. As HHMI scientists continue to push boundaries in laboratories and classrooms, you can be sure that your contributions while working here are making a difference.

The EverydayAI Accelerator exists to turn generative AI into daily reality across HHMI’s administrative and operational functions. This role owns HHMI’s knowledge management layer for AI: the discipline of turning institutional information (documents, records, policies, scientific content, operational data) into structured, retrievable, trustworthy knowledge that AI systems can actually use.

The work is technical and grounded. You will design and operate the retrieval-augmented generation pipelines that every Accelerator project depends on: the chunking, embedding, indexing, and retrieval patterns that turn HHMI’s content into something AI can find and reason over. For use cases where a graph representation is the right tool (complex entity relationships, lineage, multi-hop reasoning), the knowledge graph gets built and operated alongside it.

This work happens in partnership with the Principal AI Architect, who owns the AI platform and engineering foundation, and the Technology and Systems Management (TSM) Data Integrations team, who owns the data pipelines from source systems. Whoever holds this role designs the knowledge architecture and is accountable for operating it.

Why this role mattersHHMI’s scientific, financial, and operational knowledge lives scattered across documents, databases, and systems never built to talk to AI. Without someone accountable for turning that information into something structured and trustworthy, every AI initiative at HHMI either repeats the same expensive groundwork or surfaces answers no one can stand behind. This role solves that problem once so that every Accelerator project and future AI effort can build on a governed, reliable knowledge foundation instead of reinventing it.

What you will actually doOwn HHMI’s knowledge management architecture. Design how institutional content is captured, structured, classified, retrieved, and maintained over time. Make the calls on representation (chunked text, embeddings, structured records, knowledge graphs, or hybrid) for each kind of content and each kind of use case, and own the consequences.

Build and operate the RAG pipelines. Design and run the retrieval-augmented generation systems that every AI product at HHMI consumes, including document processing, chunking, embedding, indexing, hybrid retrieval, re-ranking, query rewriting. New projects inherit proven patterns; they do not roll their own.

Build knowledge graphs where the use case requires it. For problems where graph representation is the right tool (complex entity resolution, multi-hop reasoning, lineage and provenance, relationship-heavy queries), design the data model, stand up the graph store, and operate it.

Extract structure from unstructured content. Build the pipelines that turn HHMI’s documents (policies, applications, financial records, scientific content) into something AI can consume. Use the right mix of LLM-based extraction, classical NLP, and rule-based methods for each source, and be able to explain why.

Solve entity resolution. The same person, fund, application, or concept appears across many systems with many representations. Build the deduplication, linking, and canonicalization that lets the institution rely on a single, defensible truth.

Govern knowledge classification and lineage. Sit in the AI governance group as the…