Senior AI Architect

Company Description

Join us and make YOUR mark on the World!

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has turned bold ideas into world-changing impact advancing science and technology to strengthen U.S. security and promote global stability.

Our mission spans four critical national security areas nuclear deterrence, threat preparedness, energy security, and multi-domain defense empowering teams to take on the toughest challenges of today and tomorrow. With a culture built on innovation and operational excellence, LLNL is a place where your expertise can make a real impact.

Job Description

We have an opening for a Senior AI Architect to lead the design, development, deployment, and operationalization of advanced generative AI applications and services that support mission and operational need within the National Ignition Facility. You will help translate emerging AI technologies into production-ready capabilities by building backend services, APIs, orchestration layers, and integration patterns that enable AI applications to interact with existing operations, technical, and knowledge-based data sources.

This position is in the National Ignition Facility Computing (NIFC) Division within the Computing Directorate.

This position offers a hybrid schedule, blending in-person and virtual presence. You will have the flexibility to work from home one or more days per week.

This position will be filled at either the SES.
3 or SES.
4 level based on knowledge and related experience as assessed by the hiring team. Additional job responsibilities (outlined below) will be assigned if hired at the higher level.

You will

• Lead the architecture, design, development, deployment, and lifecycle support of GenAI-enabled applications and services that address mission and operational needs.
• Design and implement scalable, secure, and maintainable AI solutions across cloud-based and on-premises infrastructure, including Kubernetes-based environments and open-source or commercially supported AI tool chains.
• Evaluate use cases and determine appropriate technical architectures for retrieval-grounded GenAI applications, semantic search, LLM-enabled workflows, RESTful APIs, agentic integration patterns, and related AI services.
• Develop and maintain backend services, APIs, orchestration layers, and application integration components that enable AI applications to securely access, transform, and use operational, technical, and knowledge-based data sources.
• Drive engineering approaches that improve AI application quality and operational effectiveness, including prompt design, grounding strategies, evaluation methods, observability, performance optimization, cost-aware implementation, and appropriate safeguards.
• Serve as a technical leader by guiding architectural decisions, sharing best practices, and helping build broader team capability in AI application development and support.
• Partner with customers, domain experts, developers, and infrastructure teams to translate operational needs into production-ready AI solutions and reusable technical capabilities.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Additional responsibilities at the SES.
4 Level

• Provide technical leadership and strategic direction for departmental GenAI architecture, platform patterns, and integration approaches, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, reusable, and aligned with long-term organizational needs.
• Lead complex, cross-functional AI initiatives; make high-impact technical decisions; and serve as a senior advisor to management and engineering teams on GenAI architecture, implementation strategy, platform evolution, and technology selection.
• Serve as a mentor and help establish best practices in GenAI engineering, API-first design, platform portability, and lifecycle management to strengthen team capability and enable successful delivery across multiple products and projects.

Qualifications

• Ability to obtain and maintain a US DOE Q-level security clearance which requires U.S. Citizenship.
• Bachelor's degree in a computer or engineering related field, or the equivalent combination of education and related experience.
• Significant experience architecting, developing, deploying,…