Principal Engineer for Geospatial Computing Infrastructure

Requisition Id 16917 

 

Overview:

As a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science national laboratory, ORNL has an impressive 80-year legacy of addressing the nation’s most pressing challenges. Our team is made up of over 7,000 dedicated and innovative individuals! Our goal is to create an environment where a variety of perspectives and backgrounds are valued, ensuring ORNL is known as a top choice for employment. These principles are essential for supporting our broader mission to drive scientific breakthroughs and translate them into solutions for energy, environmental, and security challenges facing the nation. 

  

 

We invite applications for a Principal Engineer for Geospatial Computing Infrastructure, within the Geospatial Science and Engineering Division. This role will lead ORNL’s COMPASS, a next-generation geospatial data & computing platform and data center, supporting the lab’s geospatial science research portfolio with high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities. ORNL is the nation’s geospatial research laboratory. Our scientists and engineers are breaking new ground in geospatial science and technologies, advancing the state-of-the-art and scaling science for global impacts. From designing advanced sensing platforms and autonomous systems, to characterizing global population risk with increasing spatiotemporal clarity, to designing GeoAI models for supercomputer-scale applications, geospatial science at ORNL is establishing new horizons for global geospatial intelligence and human security. The Geospatial Science and Engineering Division is part of the National Security Sciences Directorate, where we translate and apply the latest advancements in ORNL and US scientific leadership to support the nation’s national and energy security needs. 

  

 

Over the past decade ORNL has earned a strong reputation for delivering novel geospatial capabilities grounded in HPC, and this new role offers the opportunity to transform the foundations of these capabilities into a distinct center with its own mission of delivering leading-edge geospatial compute and data services, driving innovation at the intersection of computing and geospatial science, and advancing research outcomes across sponsors, disciplines and institutional partners. The successful candidate will have the strategic mindset, technical breadth, and leadership skills to stand up a mission-driven organization, guide its evolution, manage its operations, and cultivate a world-class team. This role is both operational (managing and optimizing assets and services today) and strategic in charting the future of geospatial compute, orchestrating large-scale investments and partnerships, and positioning ORNL as the national leader in geospatial HPC, data infrastructure, and emerging computing paradigms (edge compute, neuromorphic, quantum). 

  

 

In this capacity you will be responsible for the technical and business operations of the COMPASS geospatial data center. Your responsibilities will include helping to refine the strategic direction and the business model (service delivery + research + partnerships), establishing operating practices, building the team, and engaging sponsors and users. You will be the face of the center internally and externally, aligning with ORNL and National Security Sciences leadership and programs, and ensuring that the center becomes a trusted advisor, partner, and innovation hub in the geospatial and HPC community. 

 

Major Duties/Responsibilities:

• Strategy & Vision: Advance the strategic roadmap for COMPASS, including continually honing the vision, value proposition, operating model (services, research, partnerships), business case, metrics of success, and growth path. 

• Asset & Infrastructure Management: Oversee the effective integration, operation, scaling and optimization of the GDC’s compute, storage, networking, and geospatial-data assets (existing and planned). Ensure high performance, high availability, cost-effectiveness, data integrity, and operational resilience. 

• Service Delivery & Operations: Define, implement and continually improve service offerings (e.g., large-scale geospatial compute pipelines, data ingest/curation/archive, analytics/visualization, user support). Establish operating policies, SLAs, user workflows, resource allocation models and performance metrics. 

• Innovation & Thought Leadership: Identify and integrate emerging geospatial/HPC technologies (e.g., ML Ops for geospatial data, real-time analytics, cloud/HPC hybrid, edge geospatial compute, neuromorphic, quantum), pilot new capabilities, foster inno