Senior AI Engineer - STARLIMS AI Platform

STARLIMS provides leading Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) solutions that have served customers around the world for nearly 40 years. Our solution suite helps labs:

• Improve the reliability of sampling and testing
• Manage complex testing workflows and analytical methods
• Simplify compliance and support regulatory standards
• Unlock comprehensive reporting, monitoring, and analysis

With multiple support centers across the globe, STARLIMS is used in labs across pharma & biotech, life sciences, food & beverage, manufacturing, petrochemical refineries and oil & gas, chemical, public health, forensics, and environmental industries-offering you exposure to a wide range of customers and career paths.

The Role:
We're building AI capabilities into STARLIMS, a platform used across life sciences, public health, forensics, and environmental sciences. This role focuses on turning AI into reliable, production-grade systems that operate within real workflows, domain-specific data, and strict accuracy requirements.

Key Responsibilities:
Retrieval & Knowledge Systems (Core Focus)

• Design and optimize RAG pipelines over domain-specific content
• Improve retrieval quality, ranking, and grounding to reduce hallucinations
• Build evaluation frameworks to measure accuracy and consistency
• Work with fragmented enterprise data and make it usable

AI Systems in Production

• Build AI-powered features integrated into STARLIMS workflows
• Design for reliability (latency, scale, model variability)
• Implement guardrails, fallbacks, and observability
• Manage prompt evolution, model drift, and regressions

Agentic & Tool-Using Systems

• Develop systems that can reason, call tools, and execute multi-step tasks
• Integrate with internal APIs, developer tooling, and external systems
• Design controlled execution paths for automated actions

Developer Platform & AI Tooling (Key Area)

• Build and evolve a VS Code-based development environment replacing a legacy desktop IDE
• Support development across a custom application framework and domain-specific language
• Develop AI-assisted workflows for generating, understanding, and debugging applications
• Integrate LLMs with platform APIs, developer tools, and contextual knowledge systems
• Design extensible mechanisms for AI-assisted multi-step development tasks

Platform & Infrastructure

• Build and operate backend services on AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, etc.)
• Own system architecture and key technical decisions
• Contribute to infrastructure-as-code and deployment pipelines

Tech Stack

• Languages: TypeScript, Python
• AI: OpenAI, Anthropic, vector databases (Pinecone), embeddings
• Frontend: React, Next.js, Tailwind, VS Code Extension API
• Backend: Node.js, AWS Lambda (Python)
• Infra: AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, Cognito, API Gateway, IAM), Terraform
• Testing: Jest, Playwright, pytest

What We're Looking For:
Must Have

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, including production systems
• Experience building RAG systems beyond prototypes
• Strong understanding of LLM behavior, limitations, and failure modes
• Experience with LLM APIs and prompt/system design
• Solid backend and cloud experience (AWS or equivalent)
• Proficiency in TypeScript and/or Python

You Should Be Comfortable With

• Debugging across distributed systems
• Making tradeoffs between accuracy, latency, and cost
• Working in ambiguous problem spaces
• Owning systems end-to-end

Preferred Skills:

• AI evaluation pipelines and metrics
• Agent/tool-use systems or similar architectures
• Developer tooling (VS Code extensions, language tooling)
• Workflow automation platforms (n8n, Zapier, etc.)
• Experience in regulated or domain-heavy systems
• Scaling vector search systems
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (ECS, EKS, Kubernetes)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar)

What You'll Bring

• Pragmatism in applying AI appropriately
• Strong ownership and system design mindset
• Comfort in a small, high-autonomy team
• Focus on correctness, reliability, and maintainability

Why This Role:

• Transform how STARLIMS applications are developed
• Drive measurable gains in productivity across developers, testers, and end users
• Shape how customers interact with LIMS and non-LIMS data
• Work on AI systems inside real workflows
• Handle domain-specific data
• Build systems requiring consistent, trustworthy behavior

At STARLIMS we offer market competitive benefits such as:
• Competitive health and Wellness (medical, dental, and vision)
• Retirement plan with matching company contribution
• Life Insurance and Disability/Income Protection

STARLIMS is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, religion, color, national or ethnic origin, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, genetic information, veteran status, age or disability status.