OVERVIEW:

ORNL is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science national laboratory, with an extraordinary 80-year history of solving the nation’s biggest problems. We have a dedicated and creative staff of over 6,200 people! ORNL’s decadal vision for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) is to cultivate an environment and practices that foster diversity in ideas and in the people across the organization, as well as to ensure ORNL is recognized as a workplace of choice. These elements are critical for enabling the execution of ORNL’s broader mission to accelerate scientific discoveries and their translation into energy, environment, and security solutions for the nation. Come join us and help solve the world’s most challenging energy problems!
We are seeking an R&D Associate Staff Member who will support the Electrification and Energy Infrastructure Division (EEID) and the Buildings and Transportation Science Division (BTSD) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
Nation-scale building energy modeling researchers create and simulate a model of every U.S. building. This involves urban-scale building energy modeling at the resolution of individual buildings and at the scale of nations to analyze building codes, energy efficiency, demand response, and climate change impacts toward a sustainable and resilient built environment. These activities involve multi-disciplinary collaboration across ORNL, collaborative partnerships and NDAs with over 50 well-known companies, and significant awards on world-class computational resources.
This team achieved world-first simulation of 125.7 million U.S. buildings, public release of 122.9 million building energy models (bit.ly/ModelAmerica), and has scaled EnergyPlus to over 1 million simulations per hour on supercomputers. In partnership with major organizations, the team is actively improving the data and algorithms of the Automatic Building Energy Modeling (AutoBEM, bit.ly/AutoBEM) software suite which involves big data processing, data analytics, machine learning, high-performance computing resources, computer vision, and building science to create, model, simulate, validate, and analyze building performance to create software prototypes (e.g. dashboards, bit.ly/virtual_epb) for actionable use of building data, models, or analysis by specific stakeholders. Over 50 million core-hours have been awarded to release a Model America v2.0 dataset in 2022. Would you like to be part of the team that releases a model of every U.S. building?
As a full-time R&D Associate Staff Member your work will consist of help leading development and implementation of data organization and software development for scalable use and analysis of business-sensitive data. You will support Distinguished R&D staff in the invention or improvement of innovative algorithms for detection or estimation of building characteristics, validation against known data sources, scalable generation/simulation of buildings using OpenStudio and EnergyPlus, and/or use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to quantify and improve city-to-nation scales of individual building energy models. As part of R&D, you will be required to manage big data, create and extend existing software capabilities, develop simple graphic user interfaces, and have the ability to work effectively with a team for effective integration of data, algorithms, and knowledge.
The position requires working both individually and as a team to direct development of innovative software techniques, knowledge of building energy modeling, frequent and consistent review of related literature, and collaboration with other team members for the development of technical capabilities, demonstrations, proposals, oral presentations, and publications.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

• A PhD in Computer Science, Mechanical Engineer, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
• Published technical work in journal articles
• Presentation experience at conferences

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Development or demonstration of urban-scale building energy modeling/analysis
• Demonstration of projects involving big data management (esp. TBs)
• Expertise/Experience with architectural computational design
• Experience with automation and establishing computational workflows
• Experience with modern programing languages, and Git version control system
• Experience with PyTorch, Jupyter Notebooks, TensorFlow
• Familiarity with developing or debugging software for world-class high performance computing resources
• Familiarity with creation and submission of open-source data (e.g., Zenodo, Kaggle)
• Experience with cloud services containers, such as AWS and Docker
• Experience working in Agile/SCRUM teams
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Motivated and conscientious self-starter with the ability to work independently, follow-up on all action items, coordinate with a team, and participate creatively in collaborative teams across the laboratory to ensure timely completion of deliverables
• Ability to function well in a fast-paced research environment, set priorities to accomplish multiple tasks within deadlines, and adapt to changing needs
  

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This position will remain open for a minimum of 5 days after which it will close when a qualified candidate is identified and/or hired.
We accept Word (.doc, .docx), Adobe (unsecured .pdf), Rich Text Format (.rtf), and HTML (.htm, .html) up to 5MB in size. Resumes from third party vendors will not be accepted; these resumes will be deleted and the candidates submitted will not be considered for employment.
If you have trouble applying for a position, please email ORNLRecruiting@ornl.gov.
ORNL is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants, including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans, are encouraged to apply. UT-Battelle is an E-Verify employer

• Proven RDD&D experience in building energy modeling, software development
• Excellent programming skills, including Python
• Excellent building science or mechanical engineering skills
• Experience with OpenStudio measures and EnergyPlus
• Hands-on skills and experience developing impactful software applications
• Excellent communication skills for conveying technical material to both scientists and non-scientists in both written and oral presentations
• Self-disciplined work ethic and eagerness to tackle challenging research problems
• Strong desire to work in a team environment
• Deliver ORNL’s mission by aligning behaviors, priorities, and interactions with our core values of Impact, Integrity, Teamwork, Safety, and Service. Promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility by fostering a respectful workplace - in how we treat one another, work together, and measure success.