VB Software Engineer in London

Titian Software specialises in software for sample management. We offer software products that help most of the market-leading, and a growing number of small pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies to improve the supply of samples (compounds, biologicals and reagents) to their vital research processes.

Creating and enhancing such a software solution is a challenging task. It involves constant learning, great algorithmic complexity and variety, and tricky performance considerations. We use Scrum, and are very quality-conscious, with peer-reviews, unit- and manual integration tests (done mainly by dedicated testers) and clearly defined but always improving procedures and guidelines. We have a growing DevOps culture to optimise the pipeline and are always open to suggestions for improvements.

The team consists of a diverse set of components, including front and back end technologies. Since customer requirements are always evolving, our Scrum teams have the opportunity to work with a varied set of technologies and code base. This vacancy is within a Titian Software Scrum team specialising in desktop applications integrating with automated liquid handlers from a multitude of hardware vendors. The team will be developing new enhancements to a mature VB6 application crucial to many large pharmaceuticals and bio-tech companies, and assist with longer term modernising of the application.

You will join a Scrum team with 3-5 other developers and a tester. At least one of the developers or the team leader is very experienced (5+ years) and helps with the designs and maintaining the quality via code reviews. For the customer requirements, the team can rely on experienced (often 10+ years) application consultants knowing the customer processes.

Our developers and application consultants come from different backgrounds (software engineering, natural/applied sciences, pharmaceutical) and different countries. With flexible working hours, remote working options, casual dress code and frequent social events, this creates a friendly atmosphere to work in.

The challenge involves a single product with a modular architecture, allowing us to extend our core functionalities effortlessly to provide more robust and meaningful solutions for our customers. The pharmaceutical/biotech sector is very sensitive to quality, as they are doing expensive and high-throughput operations. Naturally, code quality is a major metric for us, and we adhere to a set of useful procedures and guidelines. We also have a product built robustly to handle errors from external sources or events safely and gracefully.

Apart from quality, our customers are also very security-oriented. This was even more of a challenge when we recently started a SAAS offering on an AWS infrastructure. We started with only a set of packages offered this way and are slowly extending this to the whole product range.

The process begins with requirements from customers that our application consultants and software team members analyse and break down into gaps. The scrum team working on the project breaks this down to further functional user stories. We keep the customer updated throughout the process, often providing periodical releases they test and move into production. Before releases, we conduct in-house UAT execution of the whole business processes. For actual releases, members of the scrum team often go to customer sites to supervise the first testing, especially when integrating with a new machine, robotic platform or external software system. We have a very good track record of projects finished on time, to budget and to the customer's satisfaction.

The opportunities for our software engineers include progressing on a technical track (Senior Software Engineer with e.g. tech lead role), a management track (Software Team Leader with e.g. project manager role) or a consultant track (Application Consultant with client-facing roles), dependent on their interest. Since we are a small company, people can also define their ideal roles and we do all we can to provide it to them.

Qualifications include a preference for candidates who enjoy good algorithmic challenges, can produce quality code, have experience with relational databases and Visual Basic 6. We also prefer candidates with at least one year of commercial experience. Experience with C#/.NET, ASP/ASP.NET is a plus.

We provide a friendly, supportive, well-organised environment, with good work-life balance and opportunities for self-improvement. Our teams work partly remotely.

• Flexible Working Hours
• Partially remote working option
• Pluralsight Subscription
• Social Events
• Contribution to Certifications
• Pension
• Cycle Scheme
• Flexible Annual Leave Allowance
• Central London Location