Lead DevOps/Platform Engineer IV - Richland, WA

Lead DevOps/Platform Engineer

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. The National Security Directorate (NSD) drives science-based, mission-focused solutions to take on complex, real-world threats to our nation and the world. The AI and Data Analytics Division, part of NSD, combines profound domain expertise and creative integration of advanced hardware and software to deliver computational solutions that address complex data and analytic challenges.

We are seeking a Lead DevOps/Platform Engineer to join PNNL's advanced AI engineering initiatives, contributing to next-generation systems spanning agentic AI platforms, large-scale data orchestration, and real-time intelligence processing. In this role, you'll apply your expertise in scalable system design and AI/ML engineering to build mission-critical capabilities while developing your technical leadership and establishing yourself as a key contributor to our engineering community.

You're an accomplished engineer with strong foundations in DevOps, scalable system design, AI/ML development, and production software engineering. You're ready to take on increasing technical responsibility, leading components of complex systems while mentoring junior team members. You excel at translating technical requirements into working solutions, selecting appropriate approaches for challenging problems, and contributing meaningfully to technical direction and project success.

AI-Native Systems & Platforms

• Design and deploy scalable agentic AI systems with dynamic reasoning and decision-making capabilities
• Architect LLM orchestration frameworks using LangChain, LlamaIndex, and emerging agent platforms
• Build MLOps platforms spanning experiment tracking, model versioning, deployment, and governance
• Develop developer-focused tooling, adapters, and interfaces for AI-native frameworks
• Integrate multi-modal data sources (text, vision, structured/sensor data) into cohesive reasoning pipelines

Scalable Infrastructure & Data Systems

• Design microservices architectures coordinating across multiple domains and security enclaves
• Lead distributed system design processing data from hundreds of sources simultaneously
• Architect real-time streaming platforms handling terabytes per hour with event-driven architectures
• Build robust data pipelines for petabyte-scale ETL, data lake/mesh architectures, and real-time analytics
• Design container orchestration (Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines for classified and edge environments

Mission-Critical Production Systems

• Deploy AI systems in highly secure environments with resilient agent-to-agent communications
• Create monitoring and observability systems (logging, metrics, tracing) across secure enclaves
• Ensure compliance with ethical AI standards and security-first DevOps practices
• Build geospatial processing, time-series, and intelligence data fusion capabilities

Technical Leadership

• Lead a team of engineers to deliver on high risk / high impact ambiguous technical scope
• Drive technical strategy and architectural decisions across cross-functional teams
• Translate ambiguous requirements and cutting-edge research into actionable technical roadmaps
• Lead design discussions shaping team-wide engineering standards
• Mentor engineering teams and guide junior scientists/engineers

This position is based in Richland, WA requires an onsite presence Monday through Thursday, with Friday as required by business needs.