Senior Software Engineer — Java | Spring Boot | AWS | Oracle / PostgreSQL

Senior Software Engineer

Position Location: San Jose, Costa Rica

Position Purpose The Senior Software Engineer leads the evolution of next-generation donor management and digital health systems within a leading plasma collection organization. This role operates beyond traditional application support to design, build, and modernize scalable, cloud-native platforms that directly impact donor experience, operational efficiency, and data-driven decision making.

The Senior Software Engineer partners across quality, operations, and regulatory stakeholders to deliver innovation initiatives including system modernization, intelligent analytics, and integration across medical devices, enterprise platforms, and cloud infrastructure. This role is expected to bring strong full-stack or platform engineering depth combined with the architectural judgment to guide significant technical decisions.

This role stays close enough to the work to be credible with the engineers doing it. It contributes personally to the hardest technical decisions and delegates confidently elsewhere.

Principal Accountabilities

1. Cloud-Native Application Development

• Design and develop cloud-native, distributed systems supporting employee and donor-facing applications and enterprise integrations.
• Build full-stack solutions using modern frameworks including Spring Boot, REST APIs, HTMX, and contemporary UI frameworks.
• Apply modern engineering practices including CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and full-stack observability.
• Adopt AI coding assistants as part of daily engineering practice. Contribute to team standards for acceptable use, prompt patterns, and updated quality gates for AI-generated code.

2. Platform Modernization

• Lead re-architecture of legacy platforms into scalable microservices and event-driven architectures.
• Drive cloud-readiness modernization initiatives, assessing legacy systems for lift-and-shift, re-platform, or re-build approaches.
• Manage technical debt systematically; propose and execute refactoring strategies that improve long-term platform health.
• Apply progressive migration patterns such as strangler fig, dual-write, and shadow traffic when moving capabilities out of legacy platforms into purpose-built products. Transitions in regulated systems should be validated with evidence and rolled back safely if the evidence warrants.

3. Integration & Data Engineering

• Lead design of integration strategies using API-led, and event-driven patterns (Kafka, SQS/SNS), and ESB approaches where legacy interfacing requires them.
• Design data pipelines and operational analytics platforms to enable real-time operational insights.
• Rapidly prototype and evaluate emerging technologies to advance integration across medical devices, mobile systems, and enterprise platforms.
• Contribute to the shared data platform initiative underway across the Plasma technology portfolio. Define data contracts specifying shape, freshness, quality thresholds, and lineage between data producers and consumers, complementing the API contract discipline already in place.

4. AI & Advanced Capabilities

• Explore, prototype, and consume in production AI-enabled workflows including intelligent automation, predictive insights, LLM-based process augmentation, and retrieval-augmented generation over organizational knowledge and operational data.
• Partner with the AI/ML Product Engineer to operationalize AI capabilities within production application platforms.
• Consume the shared AI operations capability (evaluation harnesses, observability, guardrails, prompt management) produced by the AI/ML Product Engineer so that AI features in the platforms this role owns are reliable in production, not only in prototype.

5. Quality, Compliance & Collaboration

• Partner with quality, operations, and regulatory teams to translate GxP and validation needs into scalable, compliant technical solutions.
• Write comprehensive unit, integration, and performance tests; participate in code reviews and enforce team quality standards.
• Mentor junior engineers; contribute to knowledge-sharing, documentation, and the broader engineering community of practice.
• Define and hold service level objectives for the platforms this role owns. Participate in on-call rotation and structured incident response. Use error budgets to inform the trade-off between reliability investment and feature delivery.

Position Requirements

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field; equivalent experience considered.

Required Skills & Experience

• 5 years of software engineering experience with a full-stack or platform engineering focus.
• Proven experience building scalable applications and modernizing legacy systems.
• Strong backend engineering skills in Java (Spring Boot) or equivalent. Experience with Oracle or similar RDBMS including performance tuning and data modeling. Familiarity with modern cloud-native databases (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, or equivalent) also expected.
• Cloud platform experience with AWS or Azure: compute, storage, messaging, and managed database services.
• Experience with API design and integration platform concepts (ESB, REST, event-driven messaging).
• Comfortable working across legacy runtime environments including WebLogic while modernizing toward containerized deployment.
• Experience applying CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and observability practices in production environments.
• Recent — within the last three years — hands-on engineering experience. This is a senior individual contributor role, not a step toward pure people management.
• Working knowledge of AI-assisted development tools such as coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent) and the disciplines around using them well, including acceptable-use standards, quality gates, and prompt patterns.
• Experience shipping software in a regulated or consumer-scale environment. Regulated industries include life sciences, healthcare, financial services, and other environments where controls, audit trails, and validation are part of engineering practice. Consumer-scale environments include retail, fintech, media, travel, and other settings where reliability and user experience have direct business consequence. Comfort working inside regulated context, including a willingness to build working knowledge of 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA, GxP, and EU Annex 11 as they apply to the role.

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Prior life sciences, healthcare, or pharmaceutical industry experience, or prior direct experience with 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA, GxP, or EU Annex 11.
• Experience with data visualization or reporting tools such as Power BI or JasperSoft.
• Familiarity with AI/ML integration patterns and cloud-native ML services (AWS SageMaker, Azure ML).
• AWS Certified Developer or Solutions Architect certification.

Competencies

• Technical Depth — brings platform-level engineering expertise and architectural judgment to complex delivery challenges.
• Modernization Drive — energized by transforming legacy systems into scalable, cloud-native platforms.
• Regulatory Awareness — understands the compliance context of life sciences software and builds it into solutions by design.
• Collaborative Leadership — shares knowledge, guides peers, and contributes to a culture of engineering excellence.
• Innovation Mindset — evaluates and applies emerging technologies pragmatically to solve real operational problems.
• Personal Craft — stays close enough to the code and the architecture to earn the respect of the engineers around them. Contributes personally to the hardest problems and delegates confidently elsewhere.
• Reliability Ownership — owns platform reliability with SLO-driven discipline, on-call presence, and error-budget thinking, so services remain trustworthy under load and change.
• AI Fluency — uses AI where it helps and evaluates it critically. Treats AI capabilities as production systems that need the same operational rigor as any other, not as novelties.

Send CV jagutierrez@arkkosoft.net