Computer Scientist

Role Description

The Atmospheric, Climate, and Earth Sciences Division is seeking a Computer Scientist who:

• Designs and develops computers and computational systems, including both hardware and software, with a focus on architectures, languages, and applications.
• Researches and advances theories of computation, including the design and efficiency of algorithms and how humans interact with computers and computing processes.
• Develops work products including new theories and technical advances in the field.
• Leads software engineering and development efforts for the Energy Research and Forecasting (ERF) model, a GPU-enabled, compressible atmospheric flow solver built on the AMReX adaptive mesh refinement framework.
• Designs, develops, and maintains performant, portable numerical algorithms for atmospheric dynamical cores, ensuring correctness and efficiency across CPU and GPU architectures.
• Leads GPU hardware portability efforts, optimizing ERF for heterogeneous DOE exascale and pre-exascale systems (e.g., NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPU platforms).
• Oversees deployment, build systems, continuous integration, and performance validation of AMReX-based models on DOE high-performance computing (HPC) systems (e.g., Frontier, Perlmutter, Aurora, and PNNL institutional computing resources).
• Collaborates with the multi-institution ERF development team to extend model capabilities, including terrain representation, urban simulation, land surface modeling, atmospheric chemistry, aerosols, and cloud microphysics.
• Mentors junior software engineers and postdoctoral researchers contributing to ERF and related AMReX-based codes; contributes to code review, documentation, and open-source software practices.
• Authors and co-authors technical publications, scientific publications, software releases and presents ERF capabilities at DOE program reviews and scientific conferences.

Qualifications

• Minimum Qualifications:
• BS/BA and 5+ years of relevant experience -OR-
• MS/MA and 3+ years of relevant experience -OR-
• PhD with 1+ year of relevant experience
• Preferred Qualifications:
• PhD in Computational Science, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Atmospheric Science, or closely related field.
• Demonstrated experience in scientific software development.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience and leadership in developing production-quality scientific/engineering software in C++ for high-performance computing environments.
• Proven experience porting and optimizing scientific codes for GPU architectures (CUDA, HIP, SYCL, or portable abstraction layers).
• Experience deploying and validating large-scale simulation codes on DOE HPC systems.
• Experience with the AMReX framework or comparable block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) libraries.
• Experience developing, extending, or deploying the ERF model.
• Strong software engineering practices: version control, testing/CI, code review, and technical documentation.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with a record of technical publications and/or open-source software contributions.
• Expertise in compressible dynamical core numerics for atmospheric or geophysical flow modeling.
• Track record of peer-reviewed publications on atmospheric models.
• Experience mentoring students/postdocs and contributing to multi-institution DOE software projects.

Benefits

• 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
• Fertility support
• Employees are automatically enrolled in our company-funded pension plan*
• Employees may enroll in our 401 (k) savings plan with company match*
• Employees may accrue up to 120 vacation hours per year
• Employees may receive ten paid holidays per year

Company Description

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is a world-class research institution powered by a highly educated, diverse workforce committed to the values of Integrity, Creativity, Collaboration, Impact, and Courage. Every year, scores of dynamic, driven people come to PNNL to work with renowned researchers on meaningful science, innovations and outcomes for the U.S. Department of Energy and other sponsors; here is your chance to be one of them!

At PNNL, you will find an exciting research environment and excellent benefits including health insurance, and flexible work schedules. PNNL is located in eastern Washington State—the dry side of Washington known for its stellar outdoor recreation and affordable cost of living. The Lab’s campus is only a 45-minute flight (or ~3 hour drive) from Seattle or Portland, and is serviced by the convenient PSC airport, connected to 8 major hubs.