Application Developer IV

The Role: The Application Development team builds and evolves the systems behind Addgene’s digital products as part of our digital product development practice, collaborating closely with Digital Technology teams and others across the organization, so researchers and partners can rely on the high-quality solutions we deliver. To Succeed in this Role, You Will: Lead complex digital product initiatives from discovery through delivery: turn prioritized opportunities into sound technical solutions, provide clear options and reliable cost estimates, and advance roadmap outcomes through to completion.

 

 

The Role:

The Application Development team builds and evolves the systems behind Addgene’s digital products as part of our digital product development practice, collaborating closely with Digital Technology teams and others across the organization, so researchers and partners can rely on the high-quality solutions we deliver. We are looking for a senior engineer who brings sound judgment to complex technical work, drives challenging initiatives forward while staying aligned with roadmap priorities, and helps the team adapt its engineering practices as AI and other emerging tools reshape how we build software.

 

To Succeed in this Role, You Will:

• Lead complex digital product initiatives from discovery through delivery: turn prioritized opportunities into sound technical solutions, provide clear options and reliable cost estimates, and advance roadmap outcomes through to completion
• Architect and deliver features across our digital products, balancing roadmap goals with long-term maintainability and paying down technical debt as you go
• Build and evolve systems and workflows that maintain data integrity under concurrent use, retries, and partial failures
• Help the team evaluate and adopt AI and other emerging tools in ways that improve how we build and deliver software
• Improve our test strategy by choosing the right kinds of tests so the team can ship confidently and efficiently
• Identify where performance improvements matter most and use data to guide and confirm the results
• Help other engineers grow through mentoring, code review, and pair programming

 

Skills and Competencies

 

Must-haves

• 6+ years building and maintaining production web applications, with deep Python and Django expertise
• Working fluency across a modern web stack: JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, REST APIs, Docker, Git and CI
• A track record of shaping test strategy for a codebase, balancing speed, coverage and confidence, and helping others do the same
• Experience designing systems that maintain data integrity under concurrent use, with 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, from query design to indexing and profiling
• Experience making significant data-model changes and migrations in a production application without disrupting users
• Experience with search relevance, embeddings, or recommendation systems, including measuring whether results actually improved
• Experience building, evaluating or integrating machine learning or LLM-based features, such as classification, ranking or features that work with scientific data

 

Behavioral competencies

• Takes ownership of work from 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
• Thinks ahead about what could go wrong and raises risks early
• Stays curious and keeps learning as tools and practices evolve

 

Nice to have (not required)

None of these are necessary to apply. Each would be a welcome addition to the team.

• Experience with AI-assisted development beyond individual use: helping define a team’s AI coding harness (shared agent instructions, guardrails, evaluations and automated quality checks) and keeping current as these tools and practices evolve
• Designing versioned public APIs and role-based access control for external partners or customers
• Advanced software design: layered or domain-driven design in Django, async or event-driven patterns, observability, and web security practices such as Content Security Policy
• Third-party integrations and data pipelines, including responsible handling of personal data
• Familiarity with molecular biology, lab workflows or research data

Addgene is an Equal Opportunity Employer and considers all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, ancestry, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender identity, active military or veteran status, age, handicap, or any other characteristic protected by Federal, State or Local law.

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