Senior​/Principal R&D Software Architect - Counter-Autonomy, Onsite

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Sandia National Laboratories is the nation’s premier science and engineering lab for national security and technology innovation, with teams of specialists focused on cutting-edge work in a broad array of areas. Some of the main reasons we love our jobs:

Challenging work with amazing impact that contributes to security, peace, and freedom worldwide

Extraordinary co-workers

Some of the best tools, equipment, and research facilities in the world

Career advancement and enrichment opportunities

Flexible work arrangements for many positions include 9/80 (work 80 hours every two weeks, with every other Friday off) and 4/10 (work 4 ten-hour days each week) compressed workweeks, part-time work, and telecommuting (a mix of onsite work and working from home)

Generous vacation, strong medical and other benefits, competitive 401k, learning opportunities, relocation assistance and amenities aimed at creating a solid work/life balance*

World-changing technologies. Life-changing careers. Learn more about Sandia at: http://(Use the "Apply for this Job" box below)..gov

* These benefits vary by job classification.

What Your Job Will Be Like:

We are seeking a senior software engineer or software architect to design and build complex, production-grade systems for mission-critical national security applications. The selected candidate will provide hands‑on technical leadership while contributing directly to implementation, helping deliver reliable distributed systems that operate across edge, on‑premises, and backend environments. Successful candidates will have demonstrated multiple years of software engineering experience building complex, production-grade systems and designing system architectures while contributing directly to software implementation.

On any given day, you may be called on to:

Design overall software and system architectures for distributed, real‑time operational systems.

Serve as a hands‑on technical lead, guiding engineers through architecture reviews, interface definition, implementation decisions, and technical tradeoffs.

Develop production‑quality software for heterogeneous edge and backend compute environments.

Design reliable systems that operate across geographically distributed nodes and intermittent, degraded, low‑bandwidth, or disconnected communications.

Build fault‑tolerant capabilities including failover, reconnection, buffering, state recovery, store‑and‑forward behavior, and graceful degradation.

Transport, process, and serve real‑time video, telemetry, sensor data, and mission information to multiple concurrent clients.

Design and implement end‑to‑end sensor data pipelines integrating EO/IR video, radar, RF, acoustic, GPS, telemetry, and external tactical or intelligence feeds.

Support perception and tracking pipelines, including object detection, classification, multi‑object tracking, track management, and multi‑sensor fusion.

Productionize machine‑learning inference pipelines for real‑time operational use across distributed edge and backend infrastructure.

Deploy, monitor, update, version, and roll back software and models in fielded environments.

Define APIs, protocols, data contracts, and interfaces for heterogeneous software, hardware, and third‑party components.

Work directly with operators, customers, systems engineers, and technical stakeholders to identify requirements, performance metrics, risks, and operational tradeoffs.

Participate in field testing, deployment, troubleshooting, and operational support in austere or mission‑focused environments.

Document architectures, interfaces, technical decisions, risks, and system tradeoffs.

Diagnose failures across software, networking, compute, sensors, and deployment infrastructure.

Applicants on this requisition may be interviewed by multiple organizations at Sandia National Laboratories.

Due the the nature of this work the selected applicant will need to work onsite.

Salary Range:

$117,500 - $235,700

* Salary range is estimated, and actual salary will be determined after consideration of the selected candidate's…