Research Scientist, Agentic Workflows

Overview

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is seeking a Research Scientist to agentic workflow orchestration and cross-facility integration in support of the Genesis Mission, the American Science Cloud, and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). Working within the Workflows and Ecosystem Services (WES) Group at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), you will design and deploy agentic workflows and frameworks that bridge leadership computing resources, instruments, and cloud platforms.

You will collaborate with scientists, facility operators, and DOE laboratory partners to lower barriers to scalable, automated scientific computing.

WES designs and implements workflow, data, and ecosystem technologies that enable reliable, automated execution of scientific applications across heterogeneous, geographically distributed computing environments, integrating compute, storage, networking, and visualization resources into cohesive, end-to-end systems.

The WES Group sits within the Advanced Technologies section of the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), a division of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate (CCSD) S provides state-of-the-art computational and data science infrastructure for technical and scientific professionals and hosts the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility that is home to Frontier, the first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier.

NCCS staff work at the forefront of leadership computing, enabling scientific discovery for researchers across government, academia, and industry.

• Provenance and Runtime Data Capture Systems:
  Lead the research and development of runtime data integration and provenance capture systems (e.g., Flowcept) that instrument distributed scientific workflows, ML training pipelines, and agentic systems. Design low-overhead instrumentation and adapters for common execution frameworks, define provenance data models aligned with community standards (e.g., W3C PROV), and build the query, storage, and streaming layers (e.g., message brokers, document and time-series stores) required to make workflow telemetry usable ve the technical roadmap, release process, and architecture of the software.
• Multi-Institutional Project and Technical Leadership:
  Serve as ORNL's technical lead for cross-facility initiatives (e.g., AmSC, Genesis Mission) that build interoperable provenance and workflow-data capabilities spanning leadership computing, experimental facilities, and cloud platforms. Design services that track data lineage, model artifacts, and computational campaigns across the DOE complex, and coordinate with partner laboratories to align schemas, APIs, and metadata standards so that provenance is portable between facilities.
  
  Define technical scope, coordinate multi-institutional development teams, track milestones and deliverables, and represent ORNL in project-level technical planning. Contribute to proposals and reports that sustain and grow the portfolio.
• Solutions Architecture for Facility Platforms:
  Serve as solutions architect for OLCF platform efforts (e.g., OPAL), translating scientific and programmatic requirements into deployable system designs. Evaluate architectural trade-offs across orchestration, data management, storage, and security; produce reference architectures and integration patterns; and work with facility operations staff to move designs from prototype into production.
• Agentic Workflow Design and Autonomous Control Systems:
  Design and implement agentic workflow architectures that enable autonomous, closed-loop scientific experimentation across HPC and instrument facilities. Integrate agentic frameworks with provenance and orchestration layers so that AI agents can plan, execute, monitor, and adapt multi-step workflows while producing auditable, reproducible records of their decisions and tool use. Apply these patterns to use cases such as autonomous materials discovery, self-steering simulations, and adaptive experimental campaigns.
• Open-Source Software Leadership:
  Own the technical direction and health of…