PowerBuilder Developer – Mission-Critical Client-Server Systems
Region
Remote
PowerBuilder Developer – Mission-Critical Client-Server Systems
Working pattern: Hybrid (typically 2 days office / 3 days remote)
Holiday: 27 days + bank holidays (option to buy/sell)
Pension: Stakeholder
Private medical
The Opportunity
We are hiring a PowerBuilder Developer for a UK organisation in the insurance and financial services sector. This is a classic Sybase/Appeon PowerBuilder in a true enterprise setting, supporting applications that sit at the heart of policy administration, claims, customer servicing, and regulatory reporting.
The environment is stable, long-standing, and heavily relied upon, but it’s also evolving. The business is investing in sensible modernisation: improving reliability, refactoring brittle modules, strengthening testing and release controls, and integrating PowerBuilder workloads into a wider services and data ecosystem.
If you’ve got strong hands-on PowerBuilder experience and enjoy bringing order, quality and performance improvements to high-impact systems, this is a role with real longevity.
What you’ll be doing
You’ll work as part of a product-aligned engineering team, collaborating with BA/SMEs, DBAs, testers and support teams to deliver changes safely into production.
Key responsibilities
Develop and maintain classic PowerBuilder applications (DataWindows, NVOs, event-driven UI logic) to meet business requirements.
Design and implement enhancements with a focus on maintainability: reducing duplication, improving separation of concerns, and strengthening error handling.
Work closely with database teams to optimise SQL performance, tune queries, and ensure stable transactional behaviour.
Troubleshoot production incidents: identify root cause, implement fixes, and reduce repeat issues through preventative improvements.
Support structured test cycles including integration testing, UAT, regression and performance testing—ensuring change evidence and traceability.
Contribute to release management: code reviews, deployment notes, impact assessments and back-out planning.
Document technical flows, data mapping, support runbooks and interface behaviours to improve operational resilience.
Liaise with integration teams on interfaces (APIs, files, messaging) and help stabilise boundary points between systems.
Tech stack (what you’ll be working with)
This is a genuine “core systems” role—deep engineering fundamentals in a mature estate.
Essential skills
Strong commercial experience with PowerBuilder (classic client-server)
DataWindow design and optimisation
Solid SQL skills (joins, aggregation, performance thinking, stored procedure usage where applicable)
Experience with enterprise RDBMS such as SQL Server and/or Oracle (any strong DB background considered)
Windows desktop application support in production environments (logging, diagnostics, controlled release approach)
Comfortable working in a structured delivery environment (change control, SLAs, evidence-based testing)
Highly desirable
Appeon PowerBuilder (any version) and/or experience upgrading PowerBuilder runtimes
Exposure to CI/CD for legacy apps (build automation, scripted deployments, release gates)
Source control (e.g. Git, SVN, TFS) and disciplined branching/release practices
Basic scripting (PowerShell, batch) to support deployments or environment checks
What the systems support (business domain)
Because this sits in a regulated environment, the applications have real-world impact and require high care with data integrity, auditability and uptime.
You’ll typically touch workflows such as:
Customer onboarding, policy servicing and lifecycle management
Claims capture and processing
Document and correspondence generation
Pricing/rating inputs and internal validations
Regulatory and operational reporting with strict data controls
What success looks like in the first 3–6 months
You’ll take ownership of one or more key PowerBuilder modules and become a trusted point of contact for enhancements and stability.
You’ll deliver meaningful improvements with a low-defect release profile—supported by better regression discipline and clearer documentation.
You’ll reduce risk in known pain areas: brittle DataWindows, duplicated logic, unclear error handling, or unstable integrations.
You’ll contribute to the wider modernisation roadmap—helping the business stabilise now while planning sensible future steps.
What we’re looking for
Strong commercial experience as a Developer/Engineer working with PowerBuilder in production
Confident working with business stakeholders to shape solutions and translate requirements into stable delivery
A quality-first mindset: readable code, testing discipline, documentation, and pragmatic continuous improvement
Comfortable supporting critical systems and participating in controlled release processes
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