Research Engineer Diagnostics and Prognostics Group at KBR Inc, NASA Ames Research Center

The Intelligent Systems Research and Development Support (ISRDS) contract supports NASA Ames Research Center in developing and infusing advanced information systems technology into NASA missions. Our scientists, engineers and information technologists support research and development of critical enabling intelligent technologies for all of the NASA Mission Directorates. This KBR-led team has supported technology development for NASA space exploration missions such as LADEE and TESS, supports payload development for the International Space Station, and develops robotics and autonomous operations technologies for lunar and planetary exploration. ISRDS engineers provide support in aeronautics for autonomous operations of unmanned systems and for meeting the challenges of expanding capacity in the aviation industry.

This opportunity will explore novel diagnostics methods that face the challenge of operating for large fault spaces (thousands of fault modes) with the need to execute fast in constrained computational environments – such as those encountered in space environments, where computational equipment needs to be radiation hardened and typically lacks the clock speed and memory of modern chips. This is not a Machine Learning (ML) position.

Required Skills:

1. Minimum of 3-4 years of academic/industrial experience.
2. Expert understanding of state-of-the-art theoretical approaches to diagnostics such as distributed diagnostics, sequential diagnostics, arborescent architectures, disambiguating knowledge, model-based diagnosis, hybrid systems, hypotheses discrimination, inference-based diagnosis, active diagnosis, qualitative reasoning, and others.
3. Good understanding of integrating Decision Making framework into systems health management.
4. Good understanding and experience in implementing hybrid approaches, physics informed machine learning for systems health management.
5. Comfortable coding in MATLAB, Python, C, C++, and able to integrate research quality work into the production environment.
6. Independence and the ability to take their own research path and take ownership of projects.
7. Publishing and paper writing skills.
8. Excellent communication skills and the ability to interact and gel with the team effectively is also an important requirement.
9. Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or other fields.
10. Ability to learn applications/systems in other fields and able to develop first principles/surrogate models as required.
11. Familiarity with proposal writing and development.
12. This position requires someone who is a motivated self-starter researcher, capable of working independently and as part of an integrated team.