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 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
Benefits
At Addgene, we prioritize our people with comprehensive benefits that support both your work and your life.
Full-time employees receive:
- 85% company-paid healthcare premiums including dental (extending to family members) and 100% company-paid deductible
- Life, short-term, and long-term disability insurance.
- 22 days of PTO on top of our winter break closure and company holidays.
- A 403(b) retirement account with a company match of 4% after 2 years of employment.
- Annual professional development stipend
- Annual lifestyle stipend
- Fully paid public transportation for employees who work onsite two or more days per week.
- Onsite yoga classes & wellness reimbursement
- Pet insurance
- Annual financial planning one-on-ones with our plan administrator
The Organization:
Addgene is a self-sustaining, thriving nonprofit life sciences organization that was created to help scientists share DNA-based research materials called plasmids. Our mission is to accelerate research and discovery by improving access to useful research materials and information. Since its founding in 2004, Addgene has grown and innovated in order to assist the research community by archiving and sharing useful DNA-based research materials and resources (such as plasmids, viral vectors, and recombinant antibodies) with scientists worldwide. Broad availability of these unique research materials promotes the advancement of research in a wide variety of disciplines, including cancer, heart disease, and neurodegenerative disorders, while increasing collaboration within the scientific community. Learn more here from our President & Executive Director, Chonnettia Jones.
As an “Addgenie”, you will work collaboratively with internal teams to help fulfill this mission, including scientists, software engineers and product developers, renowned customer support teams, scientific content creators, and business development professionals. Together, Addgenies create and enhance opportunities for research scientists to deposit their materials, find products and resources easily on our website, and receive unparalleled support in receiving and expertly using our materials in their own experiments.
Life at Addgene:
Addgene is a truly special place to work. We are an inclusive and welcoming group of people from many backgrounds and perspectives. We believe in flexibility, actively supporting professional development, and a strong work/life balance. We value sharing ideas and feedback with each other and the company. Learn more about Life at Addgene
We also believe it's important to make time for fun, whether it's eating popcorn at our outdoor movie night, sharing cute photos in the #pets slack channel, or sampling whiskeys at our end-of-year social hour. Bookworms, athletes, gamers, parents, foodies, and more will find community in Addgene's events and Slack channels.
Addgene works with a global scientific community in which the best innovations and discoveries come from diverse teams. We continuously learn from and celebrate a variety of perspectives and seek to create an environment where all people can feel heard, respected, and valued.
Addgene Watertown, Massachusetts, USA Office
490 Arsenal Way, Suite 100, Watertown, MA, United States, 02472
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