I worked at LBNL, at the Molecular Foundry. The day to day was a mix of typical nanoscience work (chemical synthesis, electron microscopy, etc) and work in support of the user facility. In my case that involved consulting on projects involving our users (design of high-throughput screens, teaching spectroscopy, etc), setting up and maintaining instrumentation, and developing workflows for our chemical synthesis robots.
I liked the work and really enjoyed getting to be a consultant on many projects. Turnover is massive among the researchers because there are few permanent positions, and most groups are heavy on postdocs since graduate students tended to be primarily on campus (UC Berkeley).
If pay is a concern, look closely for the open databases of salaries. At LBNL there is the "book of tears" at the library under the cafeteria, listing every employee and their salary. The exact amount you get varies wildly with the department: prior to unionization in 2016, the range was from 20k to 125k annual salary for postdocs. I hear they raised the floor to NIH levels at least, but I assume they did not make NERSC take a paycut.
I liked the work and really enjoyed getting to be a consultant on many projects. Turnover is massive among the researchers because there are few permanent positions, and most groups are heavy on postdocs since graduate students tended to be primarily on campus (UC Berkeley).
If pay is a concern, look closely for the open databases of salaries. At LBNL there is the "book of tears" at the library under the cafeteria, listing every employee and their salary. The exact amount you get varies wildly with the department: prior to unionization in 2016, the range was from 20k to 125k annual salary for postdocs. I hear they raised the floor to NIH levels at least, but I assume they did not make NERSC take a paycut.