Location: Pasadena, CA
Cap-Exempt H-1B Position — No lottery required
Caltech is a world-renowned science and engineering institute that marshals some of the world's brightest minds and most innovative tools to address fundamental scientific questions. We thrive on finding and cultivating talented people who are passionate about what they do. Join us and be a part of the diverse Caltech community. #### **Job Summary** NExScI at Caltech/IPAC has an opening for an AI Application Developer to lead the development, production deployment, and scaling of TAPchat - an AI-powered conversational interface that helps astronomers query and explore data from NASA’s astronomical archives. Beyond TAPchat, this role will identify and develop new applications for AI and large language models across IPAC’s data archives and scientific workflows. Come be a part of the team that is helping astronomers and data scientists all over the world access and explore astronomy data! TAPchat uses large language models to translate natural-language questions into database queries, data analysis, and visualizations. The application is a working prototype built with Python/FastAPI and JavaScript that supports multiple LLM providers (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini, and local models via Ollama), authenticates users via OAuth2, and runs in Docker with PostgreSQL. You will take ownership of this codebase, harden it for production use, and scale it to serve a growing community of researchers. This role will work within a vibrant team of scientists and developers at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI). As a part of IPAC, NExScI (nexsci.caltech.edu) provides archive services, community support, science operations, and analysis tools related to the discovery and characterization of planets beyond our solar system (exoplanets) using data from observatories in space and on the ground. IPAC also hosts several other NASA and Caltech data archives, and this position will have the opportunity to bring AI-driven tools and approaches to those projects as well. ##