VB Software Engineer

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 Dev Ops culture to optimise the pipeline and are always open to suggestions for improvements.

While we may not be at the front line, we are proud to serve an industry which makes a real difference to people's lives throughout the world.

Our product 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.

We have a single product,but thanks to the modular architecture, we can extend our core functionalities effortlessly to provide even more robust and meaningful solutions for our customers. This, however, requires an initial challenging design to make the change the most optimal that helps the most 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 are armed with a set of useful procedures and guidelines that everyone adheres and contributes to. We also have a product that is built robustly to handle errors from external sources or events safely and gracefully.

Aside 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.

Putting these together gives enough delightful challenge even for the most experienced developers.

Our projects usually start with requirements we get 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, and often give them periodical releases they test and move into production. Before releases, we do in-house UAT execution of the whole business processes (essentially a FAT).

For the actual releases, members of the scrum team often go to customer sites to supervise the first testing, especially when we integrate 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, and we invite you to…