Curious, is there room at LANL for a senior full-stack generalist engineer who hasn't necessarily been doing published research work? I've looked at LANL Careers and can't gauge how biased you guys are toward research backgrounds.
But it will help if you enjoy research culture. The location is rather isolated and you will probably be friends / co-workers with people doing research. (I say this because not everyone likes being around PhDs; I've met several people in software who disdain academics.)