What Your Job Will Be Like

The 2910/2920 ¿ Surety Systems Engineer (SSE) develops, implements, and maintains strategies to lead the R&D project team in successful product qualification and delivery. SSEs interface across multiple enterprises, integrating all team members in relevant multidisciplinary technology areas. They exercise critical thinking to identify, assess, and mitigate risks through the practical application of defect prevention to develop a safe, reliable, and robust product. SSEs provide critical R&D contributions throughout the entire product realization lifecycle; these contributions include requirements engineering and traceability, validation and verification (V&V), supply chain risk management/assessment, and crucial technical documentation. ¿¿

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Projects span across all phases of the product realization lifecycle from conceptual design and development, production, maintenance, and retirement. Projects include components, subsystems, and systems. Opportunities exist in Albuquerque, NM. Some domestic travel is required to support business needs. ¿

On any given day you may be called on to:

• Apply technical judgment using advanced engineering principles, analysis, and prevention-based methods to recognize and formulate innovative solutions for a wide variety of technical challenges related to electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, software engineering, computer science, and materials science in support of product realization. ¿
• Collaborate with R&D teams to cultivate independent, necessary, feasible, unambiguous (to include tolerances), and verifiable system requirements; aid teams in ensuring the design meets performance requirements. ¿
• Lead research and development teams in identifying and transforming unknown technical challenges into known technical risks to ensure and improve the safety, security, and reliability of the product. ¿
• Determine and manage critical design and production parameters; identify manufacturing activities that affect product performance. ¿
• Work with multidisciplinary teams to develop verification methods for complex requirements, often from a combination of analysis and simulated environmental testing. ¿
• Interface with NNSA design agency and the production agency to ensure design for manufacturability and mitigate risks and defects early on. ¿
• Author analyses, requirements traceability reports, verification/validation plans, qualification plans, and essential engineering authorizations that ensure the product fully meets its requirements and design intent. ¿
• Lead drawing reviews and contribute to design reviews for the project team, ensuring requirements have been successfully integrated into the design definition. ¿¿
• Use scientific methods to identify issues and risks and formulate well-constructed engineering solutions, collect data through observation and experimentation, and develop and test hypotheses; anticipate, innovate, and deliver technical solutions. ¿
• Independently assess supply chain risk management activities and adversarial threats relevant to a specific component, subsystem, system, or program; lead colleagues in developing mitigation and protection plans; advise management on formulated technical solutions. ¿
• Apply systems engineering principles to research, design, and develop experiments and processes to demonstrate that the product meets design intent, or to predict its behavior under intended operating conditions. ¿
• Lead project teams through the corrective action process ¿
• Use statistical knowledge to understand production feasibility, capabilities, or processes; use physical and computational simulation, analysis, and evaluation as verification. ¿

Salary Range

$102,400 - $199,700

*Salary range is estimated, and actual salary will be determined after consideration of the selected candidate's experience and qualifications, and application of any approved geographic salary differential.

Qualifications We Require

• A Bachelor's degree in a relevant discipline, or an equivalent combination of directly relevant education and engineering or scientific experience that demonstrates the knowledge, skills, and ability to perform independent research and development.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DOE Q- level security clearance

Qualifications We Desire

The ideal R&D S&E Systems Engineer candidate for Sandia National Laboratories will in addition possess the following:

• Graduate degree in Engineering or a highly related field where an independent research project was a graduation requirement (e.g., independent project, thesis, or dissertation).
• Experience working with Nuclear Security Enterprise (NSE) laboratories and plants including Pantex, Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and Kansas City National Security Campus/New Mexico Operations (KCNSC/NMO).
• Experience working on engineering design, qualification, production, or related modeling/simulation projects.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, ability to work effectively in multidisciplinary teams.

Also, for this posting we are seeking individuals with the following experience:

• Graduate degree in Electrical, Electronic, or Computer Engineering
• Experience with design, development, and delivery of high-consequence Category 1 NW products or equipment, such as acceptance testers, use control equipment or T-gear for military or aerospace applications.
• Analog and digital circuit design or verification
• Hardware description language (HDL) such as VHDL or Verilog for digital design or verification
• Embedded software development, analysis, or verification
• Safety circuit design, analysis, or verification
• Interfaces to Nuclear Explosive electrical systems
• One or more of the following:
• Strong collaboration and interpersonal skills, including proven abilities in effective negotiation, delegation, and conflict resolution in diverse team environments
• Ability to integrate ideas and work effectively across diverse technical organizations within and external to Sandia.
• Ability to balance multiple, sometimes conflicting, priorities.
• Familiarity with Cameo, Genesys, MATLAB, Creo, Spice, PDMLink, and PRIME.
• Familiarity with development of safety-related test plans for components, systems, or ancillary equipment.

About Our Team

The Surety Engineering group (2910/2920) is a center of excellence for research and development (R&D) Technical Quality at Sandia National Laboratories. With multidisciplinary engineers at numerous sites,2910/2920 provides R&D hardware and software surety engineering expertise throughout the entire product realization lifecycle, interfacing across various technology areas in support of high-consequence systems. We deliver strong technical solutions that increase customer confidence against loss, damage, and errors by minimizing a product's risk through the prevention, early detection, and mitigation of defects, resulting in cost and schedule savings while concurrently increasing the reliability and safety of a given system. We advocate for the use of best engineering practices and lessons learned to develop high-reliability, high-performance products that overcome the nation's most complex national security challenges. 2910/2920 also owns the National Security Quality Training (NQT) program, which trains scientists and engineers across the laboratories on consistent, risk-based approaches to technical problems. Our engineers play a critical role in R&D project teams responsible for realizing high-consequence, low-volume hardware and software products, providing customized engineering support that ensures the appropriate qualification and testing evidence meets design requirements in a predictable, timely, and sustainable manner.

Posting Duration

This posting will be open for application submissions for a minimum of three (3) calendar days, including the 'posting date'. Sandia reserves the right to extend the posting date at any time.