Application Developer IV
About The Position
The Application Developer IV joins Addgene’s Application Development team to architect and build features across digital products and lead complex technical initiatives. The role helps shape and evolve the systems that power Addgene’s operations and researcher experience, supporting reliable, clear, and timely service for researchers and partners as the organization grows. The Application Development team builds and evolves the systems behind Addgene’s digital products in collaboration with Digital Technology teams and others across the organization. The successful candidate will bring sound judgment to complex technical work, advance challenging initiatives in line with roadmap priorities, and help the team adapt its engineering practices as AI and other emerging tools reshape software development. The position reports to the Director of Application Development. The approximate start date is January 2027. The role may be fully remote, hybrid, or onsite. Applicants must reside in MA, VT, ME, RI, NC, FL, CO, or OH. The office is located at 490 Arsenal Way in Watertown, Massachusetts. For employees onsite at least two days per week, public transit costs are covered; the office also offers free parking and a complimentary shuttle from Harvard Square.
Requirements
- At least 6 years of experience building and maintaining production web applications, with deep Python and Django expertise.
- Working fluency with JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, REST APIs, Docker, Git, and CI.
- A track record of shaping a codebase’s test strategy, balancing speed, coverage, and confidence, and helping others do the same.
- Experience designing systems that maintain data integrity under concurrent use, including sound transaction handling and idempotent operations.
- Strong instincts for clean, maintainable design, favoring explicit dependencies and well-scoped state over shortcuts.
- Deep experience with database performance in Django applications, including query design, indexing, and profiling.
- Experience making significant data-model changes and production migrations without disrupting users.
- Experience with search relevance, embeddings, or recommendation systems, including measuring whether results improved.
- Experience building, evaluating, or integrating machine-learning or LLM-based features, such as classification, ranking, or features that work with scientific data.
- Takes ownership from the first idea through production and follows through.
- Leads through influence, disagrees constructively, explains tradeoffs to non-engineers, and builds shared approaches.
- Seeks and acts on feedback as readily as giving it.
- Mentors generously and shares knowledge openly.
- Anticipates potential problems and raises risks early.
- Stays curious and continues learning as tools and practices evolve.
Nice To Haves
- Experience helping define a team’s AI coding harness, including shared agent instructions, guardrails, evaluations, and automated quality checks, and keeping current as these tools and practices evolve.
- Experience designing versioned public APIs and role-based access control for external partners or customers.
- Advanced software design experience, including layered or domain-driven design in Django, asynchronous or event-driven patterns, observability, and web security practices such as Content Security Policy.
- Experience with third-party integrations and data pipelines, including responsible handling of personal data.
- Familiarity with molecular biology, lab workflows, or research data.
Responsibilities
- Lead complex digital product initiatives from discovery through delivery, turning prioritized opportunities into technical solutions, providing options and cost estimates, and completing roadmap outcomes.
- Architect and deliver features across digital products while balancing roadmap goals, long-term maintainability, and technical debt.
- Build and evolve systems and workflows that maintain data integrity during concurrent use, retries, and partial failures.
- Help evaluate and adopt AI and other emerging tools to improve software development and delivery.
- Improve the team’s test strategy by selecting appropriate types of tests so the team can ship confidently and efficiently.
- Identify high-impact performance improvements and use data to guide and verify results.
- Mentor other engineers through code review, pair programming, and knowledge sharing.
Benefits
- Public transit costs covered for employees onsite at least two days per week
- Free, ample office parking
- Complimentary shuttle from Harvard Square
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
