PowerBuilder Developer - Mission-Critical Client-Server Systems

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., * 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., * Integration experience: REST APIs, SOAP, XML/JSON, flat-file interfaces, secure file transfer
• 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.

• Strong commercial experience with PowerBuilder (classic client-server)

• DataWindow design and optimisation
• Non-Visual Objects (NVOs) / service layers
• Event-driven patterns, debugging, packaging/deployment awareness

• 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), * 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

• Salary: £55,000 - £80,000 (DOE)
• 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