Independent Researcher Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Job Summary:
Sandia National Laboratories is the nation’s premier science and engineering lab for national security and technology innovation, and they are seeking an Experienced AI Credibility Researcher. The role involves leading research in AI credibility to support national security missions, developing innovative ideas, and mentoring junior researchers.
Responsibilities:
• Lead and contribute to interdisciplinary technical teams conducting creative research in elements of AI modeling, development, and credibility.
• Help define research directions, technical strategy, and long-term vision for credible AI in national security and high-consequence scientific settings.
• Develop advanced research ideas that address challenging Sandia mission problems and craft those into original research proposals.
• Publish technical results in peer-reviewed venues, contribute to internal technical reports, and present findings to research, program, and leadership audiences.
• Serve as a strategic leader to develop funding opportunities, identify research directions, and grow a new team in the field of AI Credibility.
• Apply AI tools integrated with enabling credibility processes to advance Sandia's national security missions.
• Mentor junior researchers and contribute to the growth of a vibrant research community in trusted and credible AI.
• Focus areas may include, but are not limited to: Foundations of AI Credibility, including evaluation, assurance, and trustworthiness for AI-enabled systems, Methods in verification, validation, uncertainty quantification, and robustness for machine learning and generative AI models, AI model performance under distribution shift, sparse data, rare events, and other high-consequence operating conditions, Interpretable, explainable, and transparent AI to support scientific understanding and defensible use of model outputs, Human-AI teaming, including trust calibration, uncertainty communication, and effective oversight in expert decision environments, Approaches to data quality, provenance, reproducibility, and traceability in AI workflows, Credibility of foundation and generative models, including grounding, factuality, hallucination mitigation, and evaluation of emergent behaviors, Physics-informed AI, hybrid modeling, and constrained learning approaches for mission-relevant applications, Methods for analyzing, representing, and understanding complex and large datasets, both enabling and enabled by AI, Benchmarks and frameworks for AI test and evaluation, assurance cases, and evidence-based model assessment.
Qualifications:
Required:
• A Bachelor's degree in a relevant discipline and five (5) years of directly relevant experience, or an equivalent combination of directly relevant education and engineering or scientific experience that demonstrates the knowledge, skills, and ability to perform independent research and development.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DOE Q clearance.
Preferred:
• Graduate degree in a relevant computationally-intensive discipline where an independent research project was a graduation requirement (e.g., independent project, thesis, or dissertation).
• Experience in developing software and AI systems for enterprise and national security applications.
• Demonstrated software development skills and familiarity with modern software development practices.
• Proven ability to work and communicate effectively in a collaborative and interdisciplinary team environment.
• Experience teaming in an interdisciplinary R&D setting, including the proven ability to collaborate on cross-organizational teams and perform independent research and consulting.
• Experience paving new paths for research and development and taking steps to acquire appropriate funding and support.
• Experience conducting research and development in support of high consequence national security mission areas.
• Leadership of research in elements of AI Credibility, potentially including but not limited to the development of methods/frameworks for verification, validation, uncertainty quantification for AI, AI trust and explainability, human-machine teaming for AI, and research in methods for analyzing, assessing, and governing large datasets related to the use of AI methods.
• Command of varied communication methods, including oral presentations, preparation of high-impact visual presentations, written reports, and the ability to clearly and concisely communicate with diverse teams, sponsors, and stakeholders.
Company:
Sandia is a conducts research and development into the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons. Founded in 1945, the company is headquartered in Albuquerque, USA, with a team of 10001+ employees. The company is currently Late Stage.