Test engineers. Laboratory instruments and clinical-trial software are regulated, and every release has to be proved to work as specified. Test engineers do this, mostly at the lab-instrument makers and the clinical-trial software company Veeva Systems, automating with Playwright, Cypress, Selenium and Cucumber in Java and Python. They are about twice as common here as elsewhere, and testing takes the most juniors.

Software Engineer, Healthtech. Instrument and life-science software companies also hire under a plain software engineer title. Most of these roles are ordinary product work at the instrument makers, in JavaScript, TypeScript and Python on AWS, where science is the setting rather than the skill. A smaller part is defined by healthcare itself, mostly at the clinical-trial software companies, like eClinical Solutions and Endpoint Clinical. Together, healthtech software engineers are more than twice as common here as at a typical product company.

Embedded firmware engineers. A lab instrument is a machine with software inside. Firmware engineers write it in C and C++, and connect instruments to the lab with industrial protocols such as Modbus and SCADA, mostly at Thermo Fisher Scientific.

.NET engineers. The software that runs instruments on a Windows workstation, the manufacturing-quality platform and the real-world-data platform were largely built on the Microsoft stack. .NET engineers build them in C# with Angular or React and SQL Server, and their share of hiring grew through 2026.

Data engineers. Drug manufacturing and trials produce records that must be kept, checked and reported. Data engineers build those pipelines in Python and SQL with Azure Data Factory and Databricks, mostly at ValGenesis. They are above their usual weight.

ML engineers. ValGenesis hires a group of ML engineers who train computer-vision and language models, in Python with OpenCV and PyTorch. This group is far more common here than elsewhere, almost all at that one company.

Platform and integration developers. The same company hires developers who build reports in Power BI and connect its platform to other systems, in C# and SQL.

Python backend engineers. Drug-discovery software is often written in Python. OpenEye, a molecular-design software company, hires most of these engineers, in Python and Go, and the role takes juniors readily.

Frontend engineers. Scientists use dense screens to run instruments and read results. Frontend engineers build them in React and Angular, mostly at Agilent Technologies.

Also present. JavaScript and Node engineers at the commercial pharma-data company Norstella, a small group of GenAI engineers, below their usual weight, generalist software engineers working in C#, Java and C++, and a few C/C++ systems engineers.

Rare here. Java and cloud engineers are far less common than at most product companies, and SAP and Salesforce barely appear.