What Your Job Will Be LikeThe Emergency Response Software Development Team (ERSDT) is seeking an enthusiastic full-stack developer to join our team and help design, build, and maintain innovative software tools and solutions that support the Department of Energy's Nuclear Incident Response Program (NIRP). NIRP provides research and technical solutions, expert analysis, and highly trained emergency response professionals to support the Federal Governments response to accidents or acts of terrorism involving radiological, chemical, or biological material. The software developed by our team directly supports this vital national mission.
As a software engineer on the ERSDT, you will work alongside a collaborative team to develop a wide range of custom applications, including both web-based and standalone tools, that help scientists, engineers, and emergency response professionals tackle complex technical challenges. You will work directly with technical staff and subject matter experts to understand mission needs, translate scientific and operational requirements into effective software solutions, and deliver capabilities that have real-world impact.
This role offers the opportunity to work in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment where mission needs evolve, and technical challenges are both complex and meaningful. The successful candidate will have experience working with scientific and technical software applications and will enjoy partnering closely with scientists, engineers, and other technical staff throughout the development lifecycle. In this position, you will have the opportunity to leverage the unique expertise, multidisciplinary environment, and mission focus of a national laboratory to solve difficult problems in support of emergency response and national security.
On any given day, you may be called on to:
- Design, develop, and test high-reliability applications that support emergency response missions
- Diagnose and resolve software issues across development, test, and production environments
- Apply agile development practices such as continuous integration, collective code ownership, and code review to deliver high-quality software
- Collaborate with subject matter experts to translate scientific and operational needs into effective software solutions
- Contribute to team coding standards, development practices, and software quality
The position allows a combination of onsite and offsite work. The candidate must live within a reasonable distance of the assigned work location and be available to work onsite a minimum of three days per week as necessary.
Must be willing to support occasional travel.
Salary Range$117,500 - $235,700
*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 and five (5) years of directly relevant experience, 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 and an SCI level security clearance which may require a polygraph.
Qualifications We DesireThe ideal R&D S&E Computer Science candidate will in addition possess the following:
- Graduate degree in Computer Science or a highly related field where an independent research project was a graduation requirement (e.g., independent project, thesis, or dissertation).
- Demonstrated software development skills and familiarity with modern software development practices and tools (e.g., Agile).
- Strong verbal and written communication skills, ability to work effectively in multidisciplinary teams, and a passion to improve and expand technical skills.
Also, for this posting, we are seeking individuals with one or more of the following qualifications:
- Excellent analytical skills and the ability to derive user requirements from incomplete or ambiguous customer requests
- Professional experience with web development, object-oriented programming, software design patterns, and development best practices
- Experience developing software primarily in Java and TypeScript using tools such as Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and GitLab
- Experience building and maintaining robust applications that support a diverse user base
- Experience with REST API design and consumption, service-based architectures, webhooks, and other interservice communication techniques
- Familiarity with developing standalone applications
- Familiarity with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, and related web technologies
- Proficiency with SQL and experience with advanced database concepts
- Experience participating in code reviews and collaborative software development practices
- Skills in developing software capabilities that integrate Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies
- Ability to research unfamiliar technologies and frameworks and apply them effectively to real-world solutions
- Experience solving challenging, open-ended technical problems with creative and scalable solutions
Experience in applied AI/LLM technologies is also desired, including:
- Solid understanding of LLM mechanics, including context windows, tokenization, and prompt engineering
- Knowledge of vector databases or retrieval systems
- Familiarity with evaluating AI systems for accuracy, latency, and alignment with user intent
- Knowledge of agentic or orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph or LangChain
Additional desired qualifications include:
- Active DOE Q-level security clearance with the willingness and ability to acquire and maintain an SCI clearance
About Our TeamThe Critical Software Systems department builds mission software for high-consequence national security applications. Our work supports weapons of mass destruction response, nuclear and radiological incident response, cybersecurity, infrastructure protection, and strategic defense. We partner directly with mission customers to turn operational needs into secure, scalable software systems for scientific analysis, complex data management, and mission operations.
Posting DurationThis 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.
