Hiring a Research Software Engineer in LLMs for Water Systems

Water Intelligence Lab | University of Delaware | Newark, Delaware

The Water Intelligence Lab, led by Dr. Yao Hu, seeks a part-time research software engineer to develop, customize, and evaluate large language models (LLMs) for water systems applications. The primary focus is building reliable LLM tools for environmental data analysis, integrated modeling, and scientific decision support, in collaboration with water researchers.

Appointment: Part-time, approximately 20–30 hours per week, within applicable University and work-authorization limits. On-site in Newark, Delaware.

Compensation: Compensation will be consistent with University of Delaware policies and the approved position classification.

CPT/OPT: The lab supports CPT/OPT participation and required employment documentation for eligible candidates, subject to applicable authorization.

Responsibilities

• Adapt LLMs to water systems tasks using prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool calling, agent workflows, and fine-tuning where justified. Curate domain knowledge and task-specific datasets.

• Connect LLMs to environmental data sources, APIs, and scientific models to support data collection, model setup and coupling, simulation workflows, and interpretation of results.

• Design reproducible performance evaluations using representative tasks, held-out data, baselines, and expert review. Assess task success, factual and scientific accuracy, hallucinations, robustness, latency, and cost; document limitations and improvements.

• Develop, maintain, and troubleshoot the lab website, web applications, dashboards, and supporting databases across frontend, backend, and deployment components. Maintain tested code, version control, documentation, and usable handovers.

Required qualifications

• Demonstrated hands-on experience building and adapting LLM applications, with a concrete project showing how performance was evaluated and improved.

• Relevant work or project experience in software development, web development, data engineering, or a related area. Hands-on experience developing and maintaining websites or web applications, including frontend, backend, databases, and deployment.

• Strong Python programming and experience with APIs, data processing, Git, and debugging. Ability to explain and verify AI-generated code and outputs.

• Understanding of ML/LLM evaluation, including benchmark design, data leakage, generalization, error analysis, and reproducibility.

• Relevant training or experience in computer science, data science, engineering, or a related field; clear communication and the ability to learn water science with domain experts.

Preferred experience

Open-source or locally deployed LLMs; fine-tuning or parameter-efficient adaptation; retrieval systems and embeddings; scientific computing, geospatial data, hydrologic models, or SQL. Prior water systems experience is welcome but not required.

How to apply

Email a CV or résumé, a brief statement of interest, and one or two relevant project examples to Dr. Yao Hu at [email protected], with the subject “LLM Research Software Engineer.” For at least one example, describe the task, your contribution, the LLM adaptation method, and the evaluation results. A written or redacted example is acceptable when code is confidential.

Learn more: Water Intelligence Lab