Data Scientist 2 - Data Science and Machine Intelligence

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

About The Position

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 Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate's (PCSD’s) strengths in experimental, computational, and theoretical chemistry and materials science, together with our advanced computing, applied mathematics and data science capabilities, are central to the discovery mission we embrace at PNNL. But our most important resource is our people—experts across the range of scientific disciplines who team together to take on the biggest scientific challenges of our time. The Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division (ACMDD) focuses on basic and applied computing research encompassing artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, computing technologies, and data and computational engineering. Our scientists and engineers apply end-to-end co-design principles to advance future energy-efficient computing systems and design the next generation of algorithms to analyze, model, understand, and control the behavior of complex systems in science, energy, and national security. The Data Sciences & Machine Intelligence group in the Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division at PNNL seeks a data scientist to join the group to lead and support scientific research in the broad areas of data science, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with a focus on advancing natural language processing (NLP) and data science for scientific domains. This is an excellent opportunity to develop your scientific career in an outstanding research institution by joining an interdisciplinary research team that focuses on accelerating scientific discovery. The emphasis of this position will be growing existing and crafting new capabilities in the areas of AI, scientific machine learning and NLP to strengthen the group’s leadership position in data science and machine intelligence. A successful candidate will have demonstrable expertise in the broad areas of data science and NLP such as: (i) building and evaluating language and multimodal agentic systems (ii) cloud deployment of agentic systems. We are looking for a proactive, highly motivated individual with an aptitude for contributing on multi-disciplinary teams, and an interest in natural sciences. A Data Scientist 2 designs, develops, and implements methods, processes, and systems to analyze diverse data. Applies knowledge of statistics, machine learning, advanced mathematics, simulation, software development, and data modeling to integrate and clean data, recognize patterns, address uncertainty, pose questions, and make discoveries from structured and/or unstructured data. Produces solutions driven by exploratory data analysis from complex and high-dimensional datasets. Designs, develops, and evaluates predictive models and advanced algorithms that lead to optimal value extraction from the data. Demonstrates ability to transfer skills across application domains.

Requirements

BS/BA and 2 years of relevant experience -OR-
MS/MA -OR-
PhD

Nice To Haves

PhD in Data Science, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, or a closely related field.
Demonstrable experience in conducting scientific exploration and research through artifacts such as scientific publications in top tier venues (ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, NeurIPS, ICLR, LREC, etc.) and publicly released datasets and/or software tools.
Architect and build multistep LLM agent systems for scientific domains.
Develop reliable tool use and function calling interfaces that enable agents to interact safely and predictably with internal APIs, databases, external services, and code execution environments.
Design and execute evaluation benchmarks that measure task completion rates, faithfulness, hallucination frequency, and latency under realistic production workloads.
Create customized agent harnesses, including enhancements to agent memory and inter agent communication.
Solid knowledge of core skills in data science and machine learning, including data/information curation from large unstructured data in the form of PDFs (text, image).
Proficiency in computer science engineering skills.
Experience in a production grade deployment team is a big plus, especially with applications in a cloud environment (AWS, Azure, VertexAI).

Responsibilities

designs, develops, and implements methods, processes, and systems to analyze diverse data
Applies knowledge of statistics, machine learning, advanced mathematics, simulation, software development, and data modeling to integrate and clean data, recognize patterns, address uncertainty, pose questions, and make discoveries from structured and/or unstructured data
Produces solutions driven by exploratory data analysis from complex and high-dimensional datasets
Designs, develops, and evaluates predictive models and advanced algorithms that lead to optimal value extraction from the data
Demonstrates ability to transfer skills across application domains.

Benefits

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.

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