Senior Software Engineer, AI and ML Platforms

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 foster a culture of empowerment and innovation, where employees feel valued and encouraged to bring their new ideas to the table.