Senior Software Engineer (IV)

DNA Labs International (DLI) is a forensic laboratory and forensic software organization operating in a sensitive, legally consequential environment. Helix LIMS supports laboratory information management, casework, chain of custody, evidence tracking, report workflows, role-based access control, auditability, instrument/file integration, and customer-facing software services for forensic laboratories.

Employees in this role may have access to confidential business information, forensic case metadata, laboratory workflows, customer information, regulated security processes, and systems used to support forensic operations. The position requires disciplined judgment, confidentiality, documentation quality, and a security-first operating mindset.

United States Work and Security Requirement

· The employee must be legally authorized to work in the United States and must perform all work from within the United States. Work from outside the United States is not permitted for this role without written executive approval due to forensic data, customer contractual, and security-control obligations.

· Employment is contingent upon successful completion of DLI background screening and execution of confidentiality, acceptable-use, information-security, and intellectual-property agreements.

· The employee must follow DLI security policies, customer confidentiality obligations, least-privilege access practices, incident-reporting procedures, and any customer-required onboarding, training, or access-control requirements.

· The employee may be required to support public-sector, law-enforcement, or forensic-laboratory customers and must be comfortable operating in an audit-ready environment where documentation, traceability, and evidence integrity matter., The Senior Software Engineer IV will help scale Helix LIMS from a founder-led product into a secure, repeatable, supportable, and continuously improving forensic software platform. This role combines senior software engineering, platform engineering, deployment automation, cloud operations, reliability engineering, and senior technical escalation.

The engineer will be responsible for improving Helix LIMS deployment repeatability, cloud and on-premises environment readiness, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, backups, release safety, troubleshooting, and operational reliability. The ideal candidate is a senior hands-on engineer who can move between application code, backend services, infrastructure, automation, debugging, production support, and product improvement.

The person must understand the work conducted at DNA Labs International is in the forensic laboratory space where availability, auditability, evidence integrity, access control, and customer trust are central product requirements.

Primary Responsibilities Software and Infrastructure Engineering

· Contribute to Helix LIMS engineering codebase by designing, developing, implementing, testing, and maintaining features.

· Design, build, operate, and document Helix LIMS cloud infrastructure patterns for Azure commercial cloud and, where required, government/public-sector cloud deployment models.

· Knowledge of components such as Azure App Service, Application Gateway/WAF, Key Vault, managed identity, virtual networks, storage, monitoring, secure networking, Linux VMs, MongoDB infrastructure, and backup/restore workflows.

· Build repeatable deployment architectures for customer environments, internal development/test systems, demo environments, onboarding environments, and disaster-recovery scenarios.

· Support on-premise and hybrid deployment patterns, including Proxmox or similar virtualization platforms, Linux servers, object storage patterns, certificates, and network segmentation.

CI/CD, Release, and Automation

· Own and improve CI/CD pipelines for Helix LIMS, including build, test, artifact, release, rollback, and environment-promotion workflows.

· Automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, certificate handling, secrets management, deployment verification, and operational checks using appropriate tooling such as Terraform, Bicep, Ansible, Bash, Python, GitLab CI/CD, or comparable platforms.

· Implement release gates that prevent unsafe deployments, missing test evidence, failed migrations, undocumented configuration changes, or avoidable production incidents.

· Partner with software engineers and QA to improve deployment repeatability and reduce manual release risk.

Reliability, Monitoring, and Incident Response

· Design and maintain monitoring, alerting, logging, uptime checks, capacity dashboards, and incident-response runbooks for Helix LIMS systems.

· Perform root-cause analysis for incidents, outages, degraded performance, backup failures, deployment failures, security findings, and environment drift.

· Establish service-level objectives, operational readiness checklists, post-incident review practices, and continuous-improvement processes suitable for a forensic SaaS/customer environment.

· Participate in reasonable on-call coverage for production/customer-impacting incidents and critical deployment windows.

Security and Compliance Readiness

· Implement infrastructure security controls including least privilege, secrets management, secure network paths, encryption, hardened Linux configurations, patch discipline, and log retention practices.

· Support SOC 2, FedRAMP, TX-RAMP, CJIS-style, customer security review, vulnerability management, and audit-readiness evidence collection as Helix LIMS matures.

· Work with engineering and IT leadership to ensure cloud and on-premise environments are documented, controlled, recoverable, and supportable.

· 6+ years of experience in full stack engineering, DevOps, SRE, systems engineering, platform engineering, cloud operations, or a closely related role.

· Strong software engineering experience, including the ability to read, debug, modify, and maintain production application code.

· Hands-on Linux administration experience, including systemd, networking, permissions, logs, patching, shell scripting, TLS/certificates, and operational troubleshooting.

· Experience operating production cloud environments in Azure, AWS, or equivalent, with strong preference for Azure experience.

· Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git-based workflows, infrastructure-as-code, environment promotion, rollback planning, monitoring, alerting, and incident response.

· Strong scripting or software engineering ability in Bash, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, or similar.

· Experience documenting troubleshooting steps, knowledge base articles, support tickets, defects, communications, or technical guides.

· Ability to perform all work from within the United States and participate in incident response for customer-impacting systems.

Preferred Qualifications

· A bachelor's in computer engineering/science, Software Engineering, Bioinformatics, or related STEM field.

· Experience with Azure App Service, Application Gateway/WAF, Key Vault, managed identities, virtual networks, Azure Storage, Azure Monitor/Log Analytics, Linux VMs, and private networking.

· Experience with MongoDB, Node.js applications, React frontends, object storage, MinIO/S3-like storage, GitLab CI/CD, Terraform/Bicep, Ansible, Docker/containers, and Proxmox or VMware-like virtualization.

· Experience supporting regulated, forensic, healthcare, government, public-safety, legal, laboratory, or CJIS-adjacent environments.

· Experience building disaster-recovery processes, backup/restore validation, deployment checklists, post-incident reviews, and customer-facing uptime practices.

· Security or cloud certifications such as Azure Administrator, Azure Solutions Architect, Security+, CISSP, AWS, Kubernetes, Linux, or equivalent practical experience.

Security, Compliance, and Professional Expectations

· Treat production access as privileged and document use of elevated permissions.

· Protect secrets, keys, certificates, customer data, logs, and forensic information according to DLI policy and customer requirements.

· Use controlled deployment, change-management, rollback, and approval practices appropriate for customer-facing forensic software.

· Avoid unapproved data exports, insecure test copies, ad hoc production changes, or undocumented environment modifications.

· Escalate security vulnerabilities, incidents, anomalous access, or data exposure risks immediately., * Bachelor's (Preferred)

Experience:

• SRE: 6 years (Required)
• DevOps: 6 years (Required)
• platform engineering: 6 years (Required)
• cloud operations: 6 years (Required)
• Full-stack development: 6 years (Required)

Pulled from the full job description

• 401(k)
• Health insurance
• 401(k) matching
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance
• Dental insurance
• Profit sharing, We provide: Health, Dental, and Vision Insurance, Employer-Matching 401k, Profit Sharing, Paid Holidays, PTO, plus you get your Birthday off!

Compensation Competitive compensation structure commensurate with experience.

Job Type: Full-time, * 401(k)

• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance

DNA Labs International is a privately owned, woman- and family-run forensic DNA laboratory accredited in accordance with ANAB ISO/IEC 17025:2017 and FBI QAS standards. With locations in South Florida and Utah, we are proud to celebrate 22 years of supporting law enforcement agencies in the processing of criminal forensic casework. We hold the distinction of having the longest continuous hands-on ownership of any private forensic DNA laboratory in the United States. As one of the top forensic labs in the country, we maintain trusted partnerships with hundreds of agencies across the United States, Canada, and Caribbean nations. Our mission is to provide the highest quality results, friendly service, and innovative technology to the law enforcement agencies and victims we serve.