Computer Scientist

Overview

At PNNL, our core capabilities are divided among major departments that we refer to as Directorates within the Lab, focused on a specific area of scientific research or other function, with its own leadership team and dedicated budget. Our Science & Technology directorates include National Security, Integrated Discovery Sciences, and Energy and Environment. In addition, we have an Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a Department of Energy, Office of Science user facility housed on the PNNL campus.

The Integrated Discovery Sciences Directorate (IDSD) leads fundamental research across biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, advanced computing, artificial intelligence, quantum information science, mathematics, autonomy, and DOE national user facilities. Our vision is to accelerate scientific discovery by observing, understanding, simulating, predicting, and controlling dynamic biotic-abiotic processes and interactions within complex biological, chemical, material, and Earth systems. We intentionally connect disciplines to advance fundamental discovery science, develop transformative scientific capabilities, and address the nation’s most important challenges in energy, environmental resilience, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, health, and national security.

The Atmospheric, Climate, and Earth Sciences Division is seeking a
Computer Scientist who:

• Designs and develops computers and computational systems, including both hardware and software, with a focus on architectures, languages, and applications.
• Researches and advances theories of computation, including the design and efficiency of algorithms and how humans interact with computers and computing processes.
• Develops work products including new theories and technical advances in the field.
• Lead software engineering and development efforts for the Energy Research and Forecasting (ERF) model, a GPU-enabled, compressible atmospheric flow solver built on the AMReX adaptive mesh refinement framework.
• Design, develop, and maintain performant, portable numerical algorithms for atmospheric dynamical cores, ensuring correctness and efficiency across CPU and GPU architectures.
• Lead GPU hardware portability efforts, optimizing ERF for heterogeneous DOE exascale and pre-exascale systems (e.g., NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPU platforms).
• Oversee deployment, build systems, continuous integration, and performance validation of AMReX-based models on DOE high-performance computing (HPC) systems (e.g., Frontier, Perlmutter, Aurora, and PNNL institutional computing resources).
• Collaborate with the multi-institution ERF development team to extend model capabilities, including terrain representation, urban simulation, land surface modeling, atmospheric chemistry, aerosols, and cloud microphysics.
• Mentor junior software engineers and postdoctoral researchers contributing to ERF and related AMReX-based codes; contribute to code review, documentation, and open-source software practices.
• Author and co-author technical publications, scientific publications, software releases and present ERF capabilities at DOE program reviews and scientific conferences.

Minimum Qualifications:

• BS/BA and 5+ years of relevant experience
  -OR-
• MS/MA and 3+ years of relevant experience
  -OR-
• PhD with 1+ year of relevant experience

Preferred Qualifications:

• PhD in Computational Science, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Atmospheric Science, or closely related field.
• Demonstrated experience in scientific software development.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience and leadership in developing production-quality scientific/engineering software in C++ for high-performance computing environments.
• Proven experience porting and optimizing scientific codes for GPU architectures (CUDA, HIP, SYCL, or portable abstraction layers).
• Experience deploying and validating large-scale simulation codes on DOE HPC systems.
• Experience with the AMReXframework or comparable block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) libraries.
• Experience developing, extending, or deploying the ERF model.
• Strong software engineering practices: version control, testing/CI, code review, and technical documentation.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with a record of technical publications and/or open-source software contributions.
• Expertise in compressible dynamical core numerics for atmospheric or geophysical flow modeling.
• Track record of peer-reviewed publications on atmospheric models.
• Experience mentoring students/postdocs and contributing to multi-institution DOE software projects.

Not Applicable

This is not a Testing Designated Position (TDP).

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