New

Senior/Principal R&D Software Architect - Counter-Autonomy, Onsite

Sandia National Laboratories
$117,500 - $235,700
401(k), relocation assistance
United States, New Mexico, Albuquerque
1515 Eubank Boulevard Southeast (Show on map)
Aug 19, 2026
Apply for Job Job ID 698772 Location Albuquerque, NM Full/Part Time Full-Time Regular/Temporary Regular Add to Favorite Jobs Email this Job About Sandia Sandia National Laboratories is the nation's premier science and engineering lab for national security and technology innovation, with teams of specialists focused on cutting-edge work in a broad array of areas. Some of the main reasons we love our jobs: Challenging work with amazing impact that contributes to security, peace, and freedom worldwide Extraordinary co-workers Some of the best tools, equipment, and research facilities in the world Career advancement and enrichment opportunities Flexible work arrangements for many positions include 9/80 (work 80 hours every two weeks, with every other Friday off) and 4/10 (work 4 ten-hour days each week) compressed workweeks, part-time work, and telecommuting (a mix of onsite work and working from home) Generous vacation, strong medical and other benefits, competitive 401k, learning opportunities, relocation assistance and amenities aimed at creating a solid work/life balance* World-changing technologies. Life-changing careers. Learn more about Sandia at: http://www.sandia.gov These benefits vary by job classification. What Your Job Will Be Like We are seeking a senior software engineer or software architect to design and build complex, production-grade systems for mission-critical national security applications. The selected candidate will provide hands-on technical leadership while contributing directly to implementation, helping deliver reliable distributed systems that operate across edge, on-premises, and backend environments. Successful candidates will have demonstrated multiple years of software engineering experience building complex, production-grade systems and designing system architectures while contributing directly to software implementation. On any given day, you may be called on to: Design overall software and system architectures for distributed, real-time operational systems. Serve as a hands-on technical lead, guiding engineers through architecture reviews, interface definition, implementation decisions, and technical tradeoffs. Develop production-quality software for heterogeneous edge and backend compute environments. Design reliable systems that operate across geographically distributed nodes and intermittent, degraded, low-bandwidth, or disconnected communications. Build fault-tolerant capabilities including failover, reconnection, buffering, state recovery, store-and-forward behavior, and graceful degradation. Transport, process, and serve real-time video, telemetry, sensor data, and mission information to multiple concurrent clients. Design and implement end-to-end sensor data pipelines integrating EO/IR video, radar, RF, acoustic, GPS, telemetry, and external tactical or intelligence feeds. Support perception and tracking pipelines, including object detection, classification, multi-object tracking, track management, and multi-sensor fusion. Productionize machine-learning inference pipelines for real-time operational use across distributed edge and backend infrastructure. Deploy, monitor, update, version, and roll back software and models in fielded environments. Define APIs, protocols, data contracts, and interfaces for heterogeneous software, hardware, and third-party components. Work directly with operators, customers, systems engineers, and technical stakeholders to identify requirements, performance metrics, risks, and operational tradeoffs. Participate in field testing, deployment, troubleshooting, and operational support in austere or mission-focused environments. Document architectures, interfaces, technical decisions, risks, and system tradeoffs. Diagnose failures across software, networking, compute, sensors, and deployment infrastructure. Applicants on this requisition may be interviewed by multiple organizations at Sandia National Laboratories. Due the the nature of this work the selected applicant will need to work onsite. Salary Range $117,500 - $235,700 Salary range is estimated, and actual salary will be determined after consideration of the selected candidate's experience and qualifications, and application of any approved geographic salary differential. Qualifications We Require 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 a DOE Q clearance Qualifications We Desire The ideal R&D S&E Computer Science candidate for Sandia National Laboratories will in addition possess the following: Graduate degree in Computer Science or a highly related field where an independent research project was a graduation requirement (e.g., independent project, thesis, or dissertation). Demonstrated software development skills and familiarity with modern software development practices and tools (e.g., Agile). Strong verbal and written communication skills, ability to work effectively in multidisciplinary teams, and a passion to improve and expand technical skills. Also, for this posting we are seeking individuals with the following experience: Five or more years of senior-level software engineering, technical leadership, or software architecture experience. Experience using agentic coding to accelerate development, create unit testing with high code coverage, and find bugs. Experience balancing urgent deployment needs with long-term maintainability and scalability. Experience making sound architecture decisions under uncertainty and schedule pressure. Experience delivering a new system from initial design through integration, field testing, and operational deployment. Experience with real-time media, streaming, or messaging technologies such as RTSP, RTP, WebRTC, SRT, GStreamer, FFmpeg, DDS, Kafka, NATS, MQTT, or ZeroMQ. Experience with containerized deployment and orchestration using Docker, Kubernetes, or equivalent technologies. Experience deploying software across edge, on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments. Experience with observability, including metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, alerting, health monitoring, and remote diagnostics. Experience with C++, Python, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, or similar languages. Experience with GPU, embedded, or constrained-compute inference optimization. Familiarity with CUDA, TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, NVIDIA Triton, NVIDIA DeepStream, OpenCV, PyTorch, or comparable frameworks. Experience training, evaluating, or deploying computer-vision models. Understanding of multi-sensor fusion, track correlation, time alignment, coordinate transformation, confidence handling, and uncertainty management. Experience integrating third-party sensors, vendor hardware, or externally developed software components. Experience securing distributed systems and data pipelines, including encryption, mutual TLS, PKI, secure device identity, authentication, authorization, secrets management, and audit logging. Familiarity with zero-trust architecture, network segmentation, secure remote updates, operating-system hardening, container security, and software supply-chain security. Familiarity with defense or government security frameworks such as RMF, NIST 800-53, STIGs, CMMC, or equivalent. Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical concepts, risks, and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Experience mentoring engineers and establishing effective software engineering practices. Domain experience in counter-unmanned aircraft systems, command-and-control systems, defense or national-security software, airspace awareness, surveillance systems, tactical edge computing, common operating pictures, or operator-facing mission systems. Familiarity with ATAK, TAK, Cursor-on-Target, MISB, STANAG, VMF, tactical data links, geospatial systems, or related standards and ecosystems. Active DOE Q-level or DoD equivalent security clearance. About Our Team The Mission of dept 6554 is to counter evolving autonomous threats and improve the performance of physical security systems. We conduct research, development, testing, and evaluation of components and technologies to advance the science of physical security. This enables customers to mitigate threats to nuclear materials and other high value targets by improving the ability to sense, assess, track, and respond to physical intrusions. Our work addresses current physical security operational challenges and evolving threats such as unmanned systems, including unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). We specialize in the testing and evaluation of Counter-UAS (C-UAS) systems, which counter the danger posed by UAS, and we are the C-UAS test agent for DOE, NNSA, and DHS. We leverage innovations from industry, related laboratory-directed R&D, novel signature collection and processing techniques, and partnerships across the laboratory to address real-world problems. We are creating software solutions to implement and deploy the results of our work across the NNSA phuysical security enterprise. Posting Duration This posting will be open for application submissions for a minimum of three (3) calendar days, including the 'posting date'. Sandia reserves the right to extend the posting date at any time. Security Clearance Sandia is required by DOE to conduct a pre-employment drug test and background review that includes checks of personal references, credit, law enforcement records, and employment/education verifications. Applicants for employment need to be able to obtain and maintain a DOE Q-level security clearance, which requires U.S. citizenship. If you hold more than one citizenship (i.e., of the U.S. and another country), your ability to obtain a security clearance may be impacted. Applicants offered employment with Sandia are subject to a federal background investigation to meet the requirements for access to classified information or matter if the duties of the position require a DOE security clearance. Substance abuse or illegal drug use, falsification of information, criminal activity, serious misconduct or other indicators of untrustworthiness can cause a clearance to be denied or terminated by DOE, resulting in the inability to perform the duties assigned and subsequent termination of employment. EEO All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status and any other protected class under state or federal law. NNSA Requirements for MedPEDs If you have a Medical Portable Electronic Device (MedPED), such as a pacemaker, defibrillator, drug-releasing pump, hearing aids, or diagnostic equipment and other equipment for measuring, monitoring, and recording body functions such as heartbeat and brain waves, if employed by Sandia National Laboratories you may be required to comply with NNSA security requirements for MedPEDs. If you have a MedPED and you are selected for an on-site interview at Sandia National Laboratories, there may be additional steps necessary to ensure compliance with NNSA security requirements prior to the interview date.