Senior Software Engineer, AI and ML Platforms

By joining Bio-Techne, you’ll join a company with a powerful and positive purpose of enabling cutting-edge research in Life Sciences and Clinical Diagnostics. Bio-Techne, and all of its brands, provides tools for researchers to further treat and prevent disease worldwide. Pay Range: $132,400.00 - $217,600.00 Bio-Techne develops innovative software and instrumentation solutions that help scientists generate accurate, reproducible biological data at scale. As our software portfolio evolves toward SaaS-based delivery models, we are embedding AI-driven intelligence directly into our platforms to improve usability, automation, and scientific insight.  This Senior Software Engineer role sits at the intersection of AI engineering, cloud-native microservices, and enterprise SaaS platforms. You will lead the design and implementation of scalable backend services that power AI-enabled features across Bio-Techne software products. This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who enjoys owning architecture, mentoring others, and delivering production-grade systems used in regulated scientific environments.  This is a hybrid position based out of our San Jose, CA site.   Responsibilities: Lead the design and development of cloud-native, microservices-based backend systems supporting Bio-Techne software products  Design, build, and deploy AI-powered services, including LLM-based assistants, recommendations, and automation workflows  Develop scalable REST and event-driven APIs that integrate AI services with instrument software and customer-facing applications  Architect and implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines over scientific, operational, and customer data  Partner with central IT, Enterprise Data, and Infrastructure teams to align AI services with shared platform standards. This includes MLOps practices, data access governance, observability frameworks, and security controls, ensuring that POC work can be reliably promoted to production environments.  Establish and maintain MLOps practices for model versioning, evaluation, monitoring, and retraining — ensuring AI services degrade gracefully and remain reliable over time.  Collaborate with product management, scientists, and UX teams to translate scientific workflows into AI-driven software capabilities  Ensure reliability, observability, security, and performance of distributed services operating in production environments  Drive technical standards for code quality, service ownership, and system architecture  Mentor junior engineers and contribute to design reviews, code reviews, and technical decision-making  Document system architecture, APIs, and operational considerations for internal and cross-functional stakeholders  Qualifications   Education & Experience:   B.S. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field and 7+ years of relevant experience developing and operating production-grade software systems  Or, M.S. in Computer Science, AI/ML, or related discipline and 5+ years of relevant experience  Or, equivalent combination of relevant education and experience   Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:   Strong proficiency in Python, Java, or similar backend languages with hands-on microservices experience  Demonstrated experience designing and operating cloud-native SaaS platforms  Experience building RESTful APIs using frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, or Spring Boot  Hands-on experience integrating AI/ML or LLM-based services into real-world applications  Solid understanding of distributed systems, asynchronous processing, and service-to-service communication  Experience with containerization (Docker) and CI/CD pipelines  Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience working across engineering and scientific teams  Strong ability to understand how systems work under the hood, with the ability to reason about and implement the underlying algorithms, evaluate the tradeoffs, and build new capabilities  Demonstrated ability to implement ML or information-retrieval algorithms; not solely through high-level frameworks (examples: custom retrieval, ranking and re-ranking strategies, embedding and chunking approaches, evaluation pipelines, or inference-time optimizations)  Demonstrated track record of designing and building novel systems or components, rather than primarily integrating off-the-shelf tools  Strong computer-science fundamentals: data structures, algorithmic complexity  Preferred Qualifications:   Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure  Familiarity with Kubernetes and multi-service deployment strategies  Experience managing the ML lifecycle, including but not limited to EDA, feature engineering, model training/tuning, validation, deployment, and maintenance  Experience with vector databases (pgvector, FAISS, Pinecone, or similar)  Experience with RAG frameworks such as LangChain or LlamaIndex  Exposure to scientific software, laboratory instrumentation, or regulated environments (GxP)  Experience designing systems with multi-tenant SaaS considerations and feature-based licensing  Why Join Bio-Techne: We offer competitive insurance benefits starting on day one: medical, dental, vision, life, short-term disability, long-term disability, pet, and legal and ID shield. We invest in our employees’ financial futures through 401k plans, an employee stock purchase plan (ESPP), Health Saving Account (HSA), Flexible Spending Account (FSA), and Dependent Care FSA. We empower our employees develop their careers through mentorship, promotional opportunities, training and development, tuition reimbursement, internship programs, and more. We offer employee resource groups, volunteer paid time off, employee events, and charity drives to build a culture of caring and belonging.  We offer an accrued leave policy with paid holidays, paid time off, and paid parental leave. We foster a cultu