Postdoctoral Appointee — Data Infrastructure and Software for AI

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s (ALCF) mission is to accelerate major scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs for humanity by designing and providing world-leading computing facilities in partnership with the computational science community. We help researchers solve some of the world’s largest and most complex problems with our unique combination of supercomputing resources and computational science expertise.

The ALCF has an opening for a postdoctoral position in data management targeting AI applications at scale. The successful candidate will join the AL/ML group, a vibrant multidisciplinary team of scientists and High Performance Computing (HPC) engineers. In the AL/ML group, we work at the forefront of HPC to push scientific boundaries, carrying out research and development in state-of-the-art data management, machine learning and statistics techniques. With the advancement of Exascale systems and the variety of novel AI hardware designed to accelerate both training and inference, the ALCF is studying the application of these techniques to a variety of our science applications, including but not limited to: Computational Chemistry, Plasma Physics, High Energy Physics, analysis of Light Source data such as that from the Advanced Photon Source, Biology, Astronomy, and other science disciplines.

The chosen applicant will have a rare chance to work on exascale supercomputing systems and novel AI hardware to help solve significant real-world problems using machine learning and deep learning. ALCF researchers work in a highly collaborative environment involving science application teams, academia and industry, as well as other national labs and agencies, to solve some of the world’s largest and most complex problems in science and engineering.

Objective:

• The goal for this postdoctoral position to work on development and scaling of the data infrastructure and software for AI applications on supercomputing systems and AI testbed systems.

• The postdoc will work on multimodal data management for science applications, focusing on integrating, organizing, and analyzing diverse data types to accelerate scientific discovery and innovation.

• Another goal is to develop and evaluate vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and integrate agentic AI systems to meet the demands of large-scale fine-tuning and inference.

• The postdoc will also work on design and implement agentic-AI workflows using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to orchestrate data ingest and data movement across heterogeneous storage systems, including object stores.

• The postdoc will also engage with science application teams and contribute to broader initiatives, including the American Science Cloud (AmSC) AI Services efforts, and to help us with design of future systems and data-management solutions to meet needs of our applications. 

Benefit to ALCF:

This postdoc position will help ALCF evaluate and integrate data infrastructure needed to better facilitate AI models, including training, fine-tuning and inferencing, at scale. It will help us better understand and improve DAOS to meet the needs of AI-driven science applications. We expect the postdoc to help prototype, benchmark, and evaluate strategies to better support these workloads for Aurora.

Position Requirements

Required skills and qualifications:

• A recent PhD (completed within the last 0-5 years) in computer science, computational science, a physical science, engineering, or related field

• Comprehensive experience programming in one or more programming languages such as Python, C/C++

• Experience with at least of one of the AI frameworks is required, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow

• Ability to create, maintain, and support high-quality software is essential

• Work with and contribute to domain-specific software and models

• Experience with version control software such as git is essential

• Effective written and oral communications skills

• Ability to model Argonne’s core values of impact, safety, respect, integrity and teamwork

Preferred skills and qualifications:

• Experience with running simulations or AI workflows on supercomputers

• Experience with training or applying large language models for research

• Experience with MPI and Input/Output (I/O), and data management

• Experience in writing technical papers and presentations

Job Family

Postdoctoral

Job Profile

Postdoctoral Appointee

Worker Type

Long-Term (Fixed Term)

Time Type

Full time

The expected hiring range for this position is $70,758.00-$117,925.00.

Please note that the pay range information is a general guideline only. The pay offered to a selected candidate will be determined based on factors such as, but not limited to, the scope and responsibilities of the position, the qualifications of the selected candidate, business considerations, internal equity, and external market pay for comparable jobs. Additionally, comprehensive benefits are part of the total rewards package.

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As an equal employment opportunity employer, and in accordance with our core values of impact, safety, respect, integrity and teamwork, Argonne National Laboratory is committed to a safe and welcoming workplace that fosters collaborative scientific discovery and innovation. Argonne encourages everyone to apply for employment. Argonne is committed to nondiscrimination and considers all qualified applicants for employment without regard to any characteristic protected by law.