Lead Software Engineer IV

** 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, Earth and Biological Sciences, Physical and Computational 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 National Security Directorate (NSD) drives science-based, mission-focused solutions to take on complex, real-world threats to our nation and the world.

The AI and Data Analytics Division, part of NSD, combines profound domain expertise and creative integration of advanced hardware and software to deliver computational solutions that address complex data and analytic challenges. Working in multidisciplinary teams, we connect foundational research to engineering to operations, providing the tools to innovate quickly and field results faster. Our strengths are integrated across the data analytics lifecycle, from data acquisition and management to analysis and decision support.

** Responsibilities*
* We are seeking an exceptional  
** Lead Software Engineer
** to architect and build next-generation AI systems at PNNL, spanning agentic AI platforms, petabyte-scale data orchestration, and real-time intelligence processing that define the future of national security technology. This role blends deep technical leadership with hands-on AI/ML engineering, requiring both strategic vision and tactical excellence.

** Who You Are*
* An experienced engineer who bridges infrastructure, AI/ML, and production software. You've built highly scalable systems from scratch, led initiatives that matter, and turned complex problems into solutions. You're as comfortable architecting distributed systems processing terabytes per hour as you are fine-tuning LLMs. You bring startup agility to mission-critical work.

** What You'll Build*
* + AI-Native Systems:
Agentic AI with dynamic reasoning, LLM orchestration (Lang Chain, Llama Index, Lang Graph), MLOps platforms, and multi-modal reasoning pipelines

+ Scalable

Infrastructure: Microservices across security enclaves, real-time streaming (TB/hour), petabyte-scale ETL, data lake/mesh architectures, and Kubernetes/CI-CD for classified & edge environments

+ Production Systems:
Secure AI deployments, observability across enclaves, ethical AI compliance, and geospatial/time-series intelligence data fusion

+ Technical Leadership:
Lead engineers on high-impact ambiguous scope, drive architecture and strategy, build roadmaps from cutting-edge research, and mentor teams

** What You Bring*
* + Engineering Leadership:
Expert Python + another language (C#/.NET, Go, C++); proven track record establishing best practices, advanced CI/CD, and architecting distributed systems

+ AI/ML Architecture:
Production agentic AI experience; deep expertise with PyTorch/Tensor Flow/JAX and LLM orchestration; advanced LLM optimization (LoRA/PEFT, RAG, fine-tuning); end-to-end ML platform design

+ Cloud & Distributed Systems:
Enterprise-scale architecture across AWS/Azure/GCP;
Docker/Kubernetes/IaC; event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ); API design mastery (REST, GraphQL, gRPC); polyglot persistence (SQL/No

SQL/warehouses)

+ Data Platform Engineering:
Cloud-native pipelines & orchestration (Airflow, Prefect); data lakehouse architectures; distributed computing (Spark, Flink, Ray); petabyte-scale optimization and modern data formats (Parquet, Iceberg, Delta)

+ Leadership & Communication:
Mentoring teams, articulating strategy to executives & stakeholders, balancing delivery with technical excellence, and driving cross-functional collaboration

** What Makes This Role Unique*
* You will work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and production engineering, building platforms that process the nation's most sensitive intelligence data while mentoring teams and shaping technical strategy. Startup agility on problems of national importance.

** National Interest…