Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Onterris is a leading global environmental solutions company partnering with organizations to solve complex challenges. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to modernize their Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), focusing on spec-driven and test-driven development to enhance system architecture and documentation.
Responsibilities
- Work “Blueprints Before Bricks”: the design is clarified in a Markdown specification before code is written
- Author specifications and architecture-as-code in Markdown and Mermaid.js, committed to Git alongside the code
- Help establish the templates and review habits that make spec-first development the default
- Build the automated test coverage that lets the team move fast with confidence
- Hold the line on coverage standards, particularly for AI-generated code
- Implement architectural guardrails that keep modular boundaries from eroding back into a monolith
- Use Cursor and Claude Code as primary instruments for codebase archaeology, documentation and prototyping
- Contribute to the .cursorrules and prompt libraries that encode our architectural standards
- Apply judgment about when AI accelerates (boilerplate, syntax, archaeology), when to collaborate (domain logic) and when to write manually (data integrity, edge cases)
- Produce module-level documentation: purpose, inputs and outputs, dependencies, data models and known technical debt
- Build data-flow diagrams for the sample lifecycle, Workday integration, billing and invoicing triggers, instrument interfaces and user authentication and authorization
- Contribute to the integration inventory and technical-debt register, triaging components as Fix Now, Doc and Defer or Accept Risk
- Help shape CT LIMS placement within our Azure landing zone and environment tiers (production, non-production, sandbox)
- Contribute to high-availability and hybrid on-prem design, including the instrument-integration constraints that require a local network presence
- Partner with the Staff Engineer, the cloud and landing-zone owner and the platform architects so the modernization aligns with adjacent Onterris platforms rather than duplicating them
- Develop reference implementations and prototypes that de-risk the architecture choice while it is still being made
- Help the team move from “ready to start” to “shipping” without a standing start if the modernization is approved
Skills
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Strong cloud-native engineering fundamentals (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP equivalent acceptable)
- Demonstrated practice with Spec-Driven and Test-Driven Development, clean architecture and domain-driven design
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or similar)
- Ability to read, reverse-engineer and reason about an unfamiliar or legacy codebase you did not write
- Comfortable producing documentation and diagrams as code (Markdown, Mermaid.js) versioned in Git
- Strong communication. You can explain the 'why' to experienced engineers and partner effectively across teams
- You respectfully challenge your peers, and welcome the opportunity when others challenge you
- You are flexible, resilient and curious
- You understand prior art but are compelled to iterate beyond it
- Experience reverse-engineering or maintaining systems written in Perl or another long-lived legacy language
- Background in LIMS, scientific or other regulated and compliance-driven software (EPA reporting, chain-of-custody, lab accreditation)
- Experience with Oracle, and with evaluating database migrations (for example, toward PostgreSQL and or Snowflake)
- Familiarity with containerization (Podman or Docker) and hybrid on-prem and cloud deployment patterns
- Exposure to enterprise integrations such as Workday
- Familiarity with prompt engineering and AI workflow optimization
Company Overview