Responsibilities

We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist to lead cutting-edge applied research for national-security applications. In this role, you will move beyond traditional evaluation practices and aggregate benchmark scores to design comprehensive evaluation harnesses, lead novel test & evaluation (T&E) method development, and help shape the technical direction of T&E for large programs.

As a Senior Data Scientist, you will own critical evaluation workstreams and lead small to medium research projects, translate national security needs into novel evaluation frameworks, and champion rigorous, reproducible data science and research practices. In addition to technical execution, you will actively mentor junior staff and lead business development and proposal efforts to secure funding that aligns with or expands our division's AI research and T&E capabilities.

Key Responsibilities:

• Project & Technical Leadership: Own defined workstreams or small-to-medium projects evaluating LLMs, VLMs, AI agents, agentic workflows, and integrated AI systems for national-security missions.
• Technical Leadership: Translate complex national security mission needs into strategic T&E frameworks, operational scenarios, evaluation criteria, and technical approaches specifically tailored for generative AI (large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs)) and agentic pipelines.
• Mentorship: Mentor junior staff and interns and coordinate work across multidisciplinary teams to grow junior staff into technical leaders.
• Evaluation Framework Design: Assess systems at the model, component, workflow, and end-to-end levels. Design evaluation plans that integrate aggregate performance measures with behavioral analysis, failure characterization, meaningful data slices, robustness testing, calibration and uncertainty, and mission-context evidence.
• Harness & Tool Development: Select, design, and/or develop evaluation environments, test harnesses, agentic harnesses, datasets, deterministic baselines, rubrics, and validated automated or model-based graders.
• Technical & Collaborative Leadership: Serve as a role model for research and engineering best practices within the team. Champion collaborative data science workflows, ensuring all research, code, and models are version-controlled, fully documented, and reproducible across your project team(s) using our collaborative tools (Git, Gitlab, Jira, Confluence, Microsoft 365, etc.).
• Technical Communication: Synthesize evaluation results, operational constraints, and uncertainties into technical reports, documentation, and peer-reviewed publications. Present research at technical conferences through accepted papers or invited talks.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Deliver compelling briefings tailored to both technical experts and non-technical stakeholders, clearly connecting technical findings to mission impact. Drive technical discussions and deliver briefings to sponsors and domain experts to inform and shape project direction.

Work Location & Requirements:

• This position is based in Richland, WA or Seattle, WA and requires an onsite presence.
• This position requires the ability to obtain and maintain a federal security clearance. (see below for details)

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• BS/BA and 5+ years of data science experience -OR-
• MS/MA and 3+ years of data science experience -OR-
• PhD with 1+ year of data science experience
• Experience setting technical direction and leading technical work of yourself and others on research projects.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience as a principal investigator of federally funded research and development projects, or owning an evaluation workflow or small-to-medium technical project (leading technical work of yourself and others) involving LLMs, VLMs, or AI agents.
• Experience developing and leading the design of evaluation environments, agentic harnesses, behavioral tests, validated graders, or continuous-evaluation pipelines (including "LLM-as-a-judge" methods or evaluation agents).
• Experience analyzing model behavior beyond aggregate performance metrics, including failure modes, data-slice performance, robustness, generalization, calibration, uncertainty, or distribution shift.
• Experience evaluating systems that combine generative AI with deterministic NLP, computer vision, retrieval, knowledge graphs, rules, or analytical tools.
• Strong experience using Python and frameworks such as PyTorch to conduct reproducible machine-learning research.
• Robust experience with version control (Git) and collaborative software development practices to maintain reproducible research repositories.
• Evidence of applied research impact for national security applications, demonstrated through peer-reviewed publications, technical reports, open-source contributions, prototypes, sponsor briefings, or transitioned capabilities.
• Experience leading research proposals and mentorship of junior technical staff into technical leaders.
• Active TS/SCI clearance.

Hazardous Working Conditions/Environment

• Travel may be required for project events

Additional Information

This position requires the ability to obtain and maintain a federal security clearance.

A security clearance background investigation includes review of your employment, education, financial, and criminal history, as well as interviews with you and your personal references, neighbors, and co-workers to determine trustworthiness, reliability, and loyalty to the United States. The investigation also examines your foreign connections, drug and alcohol use, foreign influence, and overall conduct.

Requirements:

• U.S. Citizenship
• Background Investigation: Applicants selected will be subject to a Federal background investigation and must meet eligibility requirements for access to classified matter in accordance with 10 CFR 710, Appendix B.
• Drug Testing: All Security Clearance positions are Testing Designated Positions, which means that the applicant selected for hire is subject to pre-employment drug testing, and post-employment random drug testing. In addition, applicants must be able to demonstrate non-use of illegal drugs, including marijuana, for the 12 consecutive months preceding completion of the requisite Questionnaire for National Security Positions (QNSP).

Note: Applicants will be considered ineligible for security clearance processing by the U.S. Department of Energy if non-use of illegal drugs, including marijuana, for 12 months cannot be demonstrated.

Testing Designated Position

This position is a Testing Designated Position (TDP). The candidate selected for this position will be subject to pre-employment and random drug testing for illegal drugs, including marijuana, consistent with the Controlled Substances Act and the PNNL Workplace Substance Abuse Program.

Rockstar Rewards

Employees and their families are offered medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, robust telehealth care options, several mental health benefits, free wellness coaching, health savings account, flexible spending accounts, basic life insurance, disability insurance*, employee assistance program, business travel insurance, tuition assistance, relocation, backup childcare, legal benefits, supplemental parental bonding leave, surrogacy and adoption assistance, and fertility support. Employees are automatically enrolled in our company-funded pension plan* and may enroll in our 401 (k) savings plan with company match*. Employees may accrue up to 120 vacation hours per year and may receive ten paid holidays per year.

* Research Associates excluded.

**All benefits are dependent upon eligibility.

Click Here For Rockstar Rewards

Notice to Applicants

PNNL lists the full pay range for the position in the job posting. Starting pay is calculated from the minimum of the pay range and actual placement in the range is determined based on an individual's relevant job-related skills, qualifications, and experience. This approach is applicable to all positions, with the exception of positions governed by collective bargaining agreements and certain limited-term positions which have specific pay rules.

As part of our commitment to fair compensation practices, we do not ask for or consider current or past salaries in making compensation offers at hire. Instead, our compensation offer