Postdoctoral Appointee — Data Infrastructure and Software for AI

Argonne National Laboratory • Lemont, IL

79d • $70,758 - $117,925

About The Position

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s (ALCF) mission is to accelerate major scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs for humanity by designing and providing world-leading computing facilities in partnership with the computational science community. We help researchers solve some of the world’s largest and most complex problems with our unique combination of supercomputing resources and computational science expertise. The ALCF has an opening for a postdoctoral position in data management targeting AI applications at scale. The successful candidate will join the AL/ML group, a vibrant multidisciplinary team of scientists and High Performance Computing (HPC) engineers. In the AL/ML group, we work at the forefront of HPC to push scientific boundaries, carrying out research and development in state-of-the-art data management, machine learning and statistics techniques. With the advancement of Exascale systems and the variety of novel AI hardware designed to accelerate both training and inference, the ALCF is studying the application of these techniques to a variety of our science applications, including but not limited to: Computational Chemistry, Plasma Physics, High Energy Physics, analysis of Light Source data such as that from the Advanced Photon Source, Biology, Astronomy, and other science disciplines. The chosen applicant will have a rare chance to work on exascale supercomputing systems and novel AI hardware to help solve significant real-world problems using machine learning and deep learning. ALCF researchers work in a highly collaborative environment involving science application teams, academia and industry, as well as other national labs and agencies, to solve some of the world’s largest and most complex problems in science and engineering.

Requirements

• A recent PhD (completed within the last 0-5 years) in computer science, computational science, a physical science, engineering, or related field.
• Comprehensive experience programming in one or more programming languages such as Python, C/C++.
• Experience with at least one of the AI frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow.
• Ability to create, maintain, and support high-quality software.
• Experience with version control software such as git.
• Effective written and oral communications skills.
• Ability to model Argonne’s core values of impact, safety, respect, integrity and teamwork.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with running simulations or AI workflows on supercomputers.
• Experience with training or applying large language models for research.
• Experience with MPI and Input/Output (I/O), and data management.
• Experience in writing technical papers and presentations.

Responsibilities

• Work on development and scaling of the data infrastructure and software for AI applications on supercomputing systems and AI testbed systems.
• Focus on multimodal data management for science applications, integrating, organizing, and analyzing diverse data types.
• Develop and evaluate vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and integrate agentic AI systems.
• Design and implement agentic-AI workflows using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to orchestrate data ingest and data movement across heterogeneous storage systems.
• Engage with science application teams and contribute to broader initiatives, including the American Science Cloud (AmSC) AI Services efforts.
• Help design future systems and data-management solutions to meet the needs of applications.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package including health insurance, retirement plans, and paid time off.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees