Senior Software Engineer

The Senior Software Engineer will be a key member of a small, highly collaborative engineering team responsible for designing, building, operating, and evolving Lab Xchange's software platform.

This is a hands-on role for an engineer who is comfortable working across the application stack, with particular strength in backend systems, software architecture, and production environments. The Senior Software Engineer will independently own major features, subsystems, and technical initiatives from design through production, contribute to architectural decisions, mentor other engineers, and help improve engineering standards and practices.

We value clear communication and coordination as much as individual development speed. The right candidate will share knowledge rather than becoming a single point of failure. They can provide thoughtful technical opinions and are willing to respectfully challenge existing assumptions.

The Senior Software Engineer reports to the CTO and works closely with engineering, product, operations, and other stakeholders across the organization.

• Own major features and subsystems from design through implementation, deployment, monitoring, and ongoing support.
• Design, build, and maintain backend services, APIs, database interactions, asynchronous processes, integrations, and supporting frontend functionality.
• Propose and evaluate architectural approaches with the CTO, explain tradeoffs, and lead implementation of agreed decisions as product, customer, security, performance, and scalability requirements change.
• Contribute to the production environment, including AWS infrastructure, containerized applications, CI/CD, performance, and operational troubleshooting.
• Design for reliable operation and safe change, including observability, retries, idempotency, data migrations, recovery, and protection of sensitive information.
• Review code and technical designs, including work produced through AI-assisted development workflows.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, technical discussions, and day-to-day collaboration.
• Help establish and improve engineering practices around architecture, testing, security, code review, documentation, deployment, and development workflow.
• Identify technical debt, architectural risks, operational weaknesses, and opportunities to simplify or improve existing systems.

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated experience building and operating production software.
• Strong experience developing backend applications, APIs, integrations, and data-driven systems.
• Strong experience with modern JavaScript and Type Script development.
• Experience with Node.js or comparable server-side application frameworks.
• Experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, including data modeling, migrations, transactions, and performance considerations.
• Experience building and operating applications in AWS or a comparable cloud environment.
• Experience with Docker or other containerized application environments.
• Working knowledge of React or another modern frontend framework.
• Solid understanding of software architecture, API design, asynchronous processing, distributed-system fundamentals, and production failure modes.
• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, Git-based source control, and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience troubleshooting production systems using logs, metrics, monitoring, and other observability tools.
• Ability to independently investigate unfamiliar systems and make sound technical decisions.
• Experience performing code reviews, mentoring engineers, or providing technical guidance.
• Strong problem-solving and communication skills.

Our current technology environment includes:

• Type Script
• Python
• FastAPI
• Node.js / Express
• React
• PostgreSQL / Drizzle ORM
• AWS, including ECS, ALB, S3, SQS, WAF, and related services
• Docker
• Terraform / Infrastructure as Code
• CI/CD and Git-based development workflows
• Queue-based and asynchronous processing
• Tailwind CSS / shadcn
• AI-assisted and agentic software development tools

Candidates are not expected to have prior experience with every technology in our stack. We value strong engineering fundamentals, adaptability, and the ability to quickly become productive with unfamiliar technologies.

Lab Xchange embraces AI-assisted and agentic software development as a way to increase the effectiveness of our engineering team.

We…