Researcher III – Data Engineer

NREL • Golden, CO

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

NLR is located at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Golden, Colorado is the nation's primary laboratory for energy systems research and development. Join the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), where world-class scientists, engineers, and experts are accelerating energy innovation through breakthrough research and systems integration. From our mission to our collaborative culture, NLR stands out in the research community for its commitment to an affordable and secure energy future. Spanning foundational science to applied systems engineering and analysis, we focus on solving complex challenges to deliver advanced, secure, reliable, and cost-effective energy solutions. Our work helps strengthen U.S. industries, support job creation, and promote national economic growth. At NLR, you'll find a mission-driven environment supported by state-of-the-art facilities, multidisciplinary research teams, and strong collaborations with industry, academia, and other national laboratories. We offer robust professional development opportunities, and a competitive benefits package designed to support your career and well-being. NLR is seeking a skilled and versatile Data Engineer to join our Data Engineering Group. This role will help to design, build, and maintain scalable and robust data pipelines and architectures that will drive our analytics and data-driven decision-making capabilities. The Data Engineering team is a multi-disciplinary team of data and software engineers, data scientists, and product developers that are at the forefront of developing advanced data solutions for strategic energy analysis at scale. Our work is focused on making energy data and software more accessible, usable, and actionable for researchers and engineers at NLR and beyond. For this position, we are looking for a candidate with e xperience working with lifecycle assessment, statistical techniques, model framework development, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis, and energy polic y is . The successful candidate must be able to operate within a large team of analysts and be responsive to quic k turnaround requests and handle shifting priorities and project uncertainty. You will join a team where everyone is striving to improve their knowledge of software development best-practices, while caring about creating the best possible solution to cutting edge problems. Our team creates secure, reusable, and efficient code, while supporting a variety of teams: A dynamic, interdisciplinary research and development environment at a leading national laboratory. Opportunities to collaborate with a diverse group of experts in software, data, and engineering domains. Work developing cutting-edge projects and contributing to research in the energy innovation industry. Access to world-class computational resources and datasets. A flexible work environment with hybrid remote and onsite work options. Professional development opportunities, including mentoring, training, and networking.

Requirements

• Relevant PhD . Or, relevant Master's Degree and 3 or more years of experience . Or, relevant Bachelor's Degree and 5 or more years of experience .
• Demonstrates complete understanding and wide application of scientific technical procedures, principles, theories and concepts in the field.
• General knowledge of other related disciplines.
• Demonstrates leadership in one or more areas of team, task or project lead responsibilities.
• Demonstrated experience in management of projects.
• Very good technical writing, interpersonal and communication skills.
• Must meet educational requirements prior to employment start date.
• Familiarity with data engineering technologies (e.g., Python, SQL, ETL processes)
• Extensive experience developing software and analyzing data with Python.
• Ability to translate technical requirements into structured data configurations.
• Strong understanding of data management concepts, data quality, and data cleaning.
• Experience with a diversity of data technologies.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent interpersonal skills for engaging with both technical and non-technical users.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for documenting workflows and explaining technical concepts.
• Ability to collaborate effectively in a team setting to meet project objectives

Nice To Haves

• The ideal candidate will have a strong blend of both data engineering and software engineering skills with the ability to work on hybrid tech stacks.
• Cross-cutting, multi-disciplined candidates will be preferred as we are looking for an engineer who can be a “data-do-all” that can implement high quality, production ready code to solve a variety of research and big data problems.
• Strong candidates will have many of the following expertise:
• Experience with big data (tens to hundreds of TB)
• Experience with version control (git/GitHub)
• Basic understanding of data management practices, such as multi-source data collection, workflow management, data storage, security, and availability, data governance & privacy.
• Familiarity with agile development
• Software and/or data quality assurance (verification and validation, testing, etc.)
• Experience with big data tools (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, etc.), data pipelines, and software development frameworks
• Experience with parallel programming (High Performance Computing experience is a plus) and hybrid computing (on prem and in the cloud)
• Familiarity with cloud services (such as AWS S3/Glue/Athena/Lambda, Azure Blob Storage, GCP Storage/BigQuery), data warehousing solutions, and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with SQL, relational databases, and NoSQL databases.
• Knowledge of machine learning frameworks, statistical analysis, and algorithm optimization.
• Experience working with meteorological data (e.g., wind or solar data in NetCDF of HDF5 format). And cloud-friendly formats, like Parquet.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and troubleshooting skills.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively in a multi-project environment with a multidisciplinary team.
• Web and API development experience is a bonus.
• Prior experience in the energy sector or a research environment is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Develop bespoke applications using diverse technologies and hybrid (on-prem/cloud/HPC) solutions that meet specific requirements of our varied client projects.
• Design, construct, test, and maintain scalable data architectures, data lakes, databases, and datasets, as well as large-scale data processing systems.
• Develop high-quality software solutions to manage data workflow, optimization, and retrieval.
• Design and implement secure and compliant data models, ETL and analytical pipelines in a distributed and/or hybrid computing environment.
• Work closely with data scientists, analysts, and stakeholders to improve data collection, processing methods, and develop tailored software solutions.
• Ensure data quality and integrity by adhering to data privacy policies and compliance with data protection regulations.
• Proactively research and integrate new technologies , tools, and best practices in data and software engineering.
• Train and deploy machine learning models to accelerate data processes for energy research.
• Explore the use of large language models to enable better energy systems research.
• Develop documentation of data, software, processes and procedures as appropriate .

Benefits

• Benefits include medical, dental, and vision insurance; short- and long-term disability insurance; pension benefits; 403(b) Employee Savings Plan with employer match; life and accidental death and dismemberment (AD&D) insurance; personal time off (PTO) and sick leave; paid holidays; and tuition reimbursement.
• NLR employees may be eligible for, but are not guaranteed, performance-, merit-, and achievement- based awards that include a monetary component.
• Some positions may be eligible for relocation expense reimbursement.
• Limited-term positions are not eligible for long-term disability or tuition reimbursement.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees