Research Software Engineer - AI for Science & Materials

National Institute of Standards and Technology; Gaithersburg (MD); On-site; USD 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

The Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Group (DSAI) at NIST is seeking a Research Software Engineer to lead and contribute to sustainable software infrastructure for AI-enabled materials and chemical science. You will embed with multiple projects, focusing on databases, AI pipelines, and reproducible research software used by NIST researchers and the broader community.

You will shape software practices, participate in planning and code reviews, and help translate research prototypes into

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a STEM field or equivalent experience.
• Experience with API design, release management, and documentation for scientific users.
• Experience enabling automated testing and CI in software projects.
• Ability to perform code reviews and promote maintainability of software.
• Experience with data pipelines, reproducible workflows, and scientific computing in Python.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and hands-on development for high-impact projects.
• Design and deploy scientific databases to support research and public datasets.
• Build infrastructure for AI-enabled science projects and autonomous platforms.
• Refactor, profile, test, and package prototype research code for long-term use.
• Support ML workflows, benchmark suites, and reproducible evaluation pipelines.

Skills

API design

Release management

Documentation

Automated testing

CI / Continuous integration

Code review

Maintainability practices

Education

Bachelor’s degree in STEM fields

Master’s degree (preferred)

Tools

FastAPI

Django

PyTorch

Job description

The Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Group (DSAI) at NIST is seeking a Research Software Engineer to lead and contribute to sustainable software infrastructure for AI-enabled materials and chemical science. You will embed with multiple projects, focusing on databases, AI pipelines, and reproducible research software used by NIST researchers and the broader community.

You will shape software practices, participate in planning and code reviews, and help translate research prototypes into