TITLE
Application Developer IV (Full Time)
WHAT YOU WILL ACHIEVE
The Application Developer IV will join our Application Development team to architect and build features across our digital products and lead complex technical initiatives. You’ll help shape how we build and evolve the systems that power Addgene’s operations and researcher experience, so we can better serve researchers and partners with greater reliability, clarity, and speed as the organization grows.
POSITION REPORTS TO
Director of Application Development
APPROXIMATE START DATE
January 2027
SALARY
$130,000 - $145,000
LOCATION & POLICY ON REMOTE WORK
This role is completely flexible to be fully remote, hybrid, or onsite, whatever works best for you! Our office is located at 490 Arsenal Way in Watertown, Massachusetts. Our beautiful office space has free, ample parking with a complimentary shuttle from Harvard Square and is on multiple bus lines, with the cost of public transit fully covered by Addgene (if onsite at least 2 days/week).
You must be a resident in one of the following states: MA, VT, ME, RI, NC, FL, CO and OH.
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…