Software Developer & AI Automation Specialist

Idaho Falls, , United States (On-site)

The Safeguards and Security Solutions Enablement team is part of the Safeguards and Security Directorate, formed to refine how the organization operates and to keep the Laboratory secure while enabling mission attainment. The team works like an internal digital creative agency, built around a single ethos: are we making it easier to be an employee, a manager, and a professional at INL, with a focus on continuous improvement.

Safeguards and Security Solutions Enablement consolidates five disciplines:
Systems Strategy, Business Analysis, AI & Automation Engineering, UX Research & Design, and Data Analytics. You're joining a small group that wears multiple hats, closer to a team of trained operatives than a five-department org chart. The Power Platform & AI Automation Engineer role lives inside AI & Automation Engineering, the team's build engine, translating discovery work into delivered application and automation products.

This is not a heads-down coding role, nor is it a throw-it-over-the-fence one. You observe teams closely to discover how work actually happens. The nuanced details of work often remain unknown or misunderstood, yet these details can be what matters most. You'll document customer needs through wireframes, diagrams, or user stories, whatever facilitates rapid understanding. From there, you iterate through tangible drafts and honest feedback, with an eye on the minimum viable product, working agilely rather than by waterfall and without being beholden to a completely nailed-down requirements set.

The same requirement elicitor stays present through delivery, checking in throughout the short cycles instead of disappearing and reappearing at the end. Skip these methods, and we risk automating a bad process, which is the same bad process, just faster.

Here's your mission: you're not a one-trick automation pony. You understand the business well enough to know that not every need is an automation. Sometimes the right fix is a workflow. Sometimes it's recognizing that a new system is the real answer, and when that's the case, you're all over it, vetting the options, meeting with internal teams to gather requirements, working directly with vendors, and staying engaged through implementation so the actual underlying problem gets solved.

This role owns full-stack solution delivery, with the Microsoft platform as the default toolset: C#/.NET and ASP.NET MVC. But the platform serves the solution, not the other way around. When the problem calls for a Python web app in Django or Flask, a .NET service, or even the discovery of an appropriate third-party solution, you'll help there too. Layered on top is real AI engineering:
Python, generative AI, prompt engineering, and agentic automation through tools like Microsoft Copilot Studio, Claude, and other custom platforms as the work demands.

We're hiring for this role because demand for continual optimization is real and only growing. And none of this is order-taking: success means the people you serve end up more efficient, produce higher-quality work, and genuinely enjoy their jobs more, not just that a ticket got closed.

• Meet face-to-face and observe how work actually happens, not just how it gets described. What people say they do and what they actually do are often different, and the small details left out are frequently the insights that matter most.
• Elicit and document requirements through interviews and working sessions, translating what a team asks for into what they actually need.…