Natoli Engineering is hiring two senior full-stack developers to design, build and run our software portfolio. For more than 50 years, Natoli has made tablet compression tooling, tablet presses and related equipment for manufacturers worldwide from its headquarters in St. Charles, Missouri. Our software includes instrumentation and control software for our presses, tooling management and inspection tools, customer portals such as TabletCAD and our online store, internal business systems, and natoli.com.

This is a hands-on, senior individual-contributor role. You will write production code most days and take work from first conversation with a stakeholder through requirements, design, testing, deployment and support. The two developers share ownership of the portfolio and report to the Head of IT; neither role leads or manages a team.

AI is central to how we will build software. We want developers who already use AI coding assistants and agents every day, know how to build AI into development tools and practices, and know where AI output needs a careful human check. You should also have shipped and maintained real enterprise software, care about quality and documentation, and explain technical trade-offs clearly to non-technical people.

Key responsibilities

Portfolio ownership and technical direction

Share ownership of Natoli's software portfolio with the other senior developer: software sold with our equipment, customer portals, internal business systems and natoli.com. Divide the work and back each other up.
Shape the technical roadmap and architecture for each application, and agree priorities with the Head of IT: new features, customer commitments, security fixes and technical debt.
Help set and follow engineering standards: coding conventions, branching strategy, code review and definition of done.
Review code from peers and contractors, and pair on the hardest problems.
Recommend build-vs-buy decisions and evaluate frameworks, libraries, vendors and tools.

AI-enabled development

Use AI coding assistants and agents [such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or Cursor] every day across the SDLC: design, coding, refactoring, testing, code review and documentation.
Review, test and take responsibility for every line of AI-generated code before it ships.
Build AI into Natoli's development tools and practices: AI-assisted pull request review, test generation inside a TDD workflow, documentation generation, and AI steps in CI/CD pipelines.
Maintain the shared context that makes AI tools effective here: repository instruction files, prompt libraries, coding conventions, and connectors (such as MCP servers) to internal systems and documentation.
Work with the Head of IT on AI guardrails: approved tools, what code and data may go to which AI service, security review of AI output, and licensing and IP.
Add AI features to Natoli products and internal apps where they earn their place, such as search and assistants over technical documentation, using LLM APIs, retrieval and evaluation.
Measure the effect of AI on cycle time, defect rates and review effort, and evaluate new models and tools as they appear.
Share what works with colleagues across IT through demos, short guides and pairing.

Requirements and SDLC

Gather requirements from customers, sales, support and internal users, and turn them into user stories, acceptance criteria and technical specs.
Own the full SDLC: discovery, design, build, test, release, maintenance and retirement.
Work in an agile cadence (Scrum or Kanban as each product needs) and help run backlog refinement, sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives.
Estimate effort, track delivery and report status, risks and trade-offs to the Head of IT.
Plan releases and versioning for customer-facing products, including release notes and upgrade paths.

Architecture, data and performance

Design secure, scalable, maintainable systems: front ends, APIs, services and integrations with third-party systems (ERP, CRM, payments, identity).
Design relational schemas: normalization, keys and constraints, indexing, and safe, versioned migrations.
Choose the right data store for each job (relational, document, key-value, search) and tune queries for performance.
Design caching at every layer (CDN, HTTP, application, distributed caches such as Redis), including invalidation strategy.
Design multi-tenant patterns for SaaS products, including tenant data isolation.

Quality and testing

Practice and champion test-driven development (TDD).
Maintain a layered automated test suite: unit, integration, contract and end-to-end tests.
Build quality gates into the pipeline: test coverage, static analysis, linting and dependency and security scanning.
Triage production incidents, find root causes and write blameless post-incident reviews.

CI/CD, cloud and operations

Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that take every change from commit to production safely and repeatably.
Manage environments (dev, test, staging, production) with infrastructure as code, containers, feature flags and fast rollback.
Set up monitoring, logging and alerting, and define uptime and performance targets for each application.
Own application security: OWASP Top 10, secrets management, patching, access control, and support for customer and regulatory audits.

Documentation

Write and maintain architecture diagrams, architecture decision records (ADRs), API docs (OpenAPI), data dictionaries and runbooks.
Keep onboarding guides current so a new developer can ship code in their first week.
Work with support and marketing on customer-facing technical documentation.

Company website

Own the natoli.com platform, hosting, performance, security and uptime.
Keep it accessible (WCAG 2.2 AA), fast (Core Web Vitals), and technically sound for SEO and analytics.
Partner with marketing on new pages, forms, campaigns and integrations (CRM, marketing automation).

Required qualifications

Replace the bracketed technologies with your actual stack; keep the rest as written.

Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
7+ years of professional software development, including 3+ years at a senior level owning the design and delivery of production systems.
A track record of shipping and supporting enterprise applications in production, ideally several products at once.
Expert, daily use of AI coding assistants and agents [Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor or similar] in professional work, with concrete examples of faster delivery or higher quality.
Hands-on experience integrating AI into developer tools and workflows: repository instruction files, prompt libraries, and AI steps in pull requests and CI/CD.
Experience building with LLM APIs [Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI]: prompt design, structured output, tool use, retrieval and evaluation.
Sound judgment about AI risks: incorrect or insecure generated code, prompt injection, data leakage, and licensing and IP.
Strong front-end skills with a modern framework [React / Angular / Vue] and TypeScript, and strong back-end skills in at least one of [C#/.NET, Java/Spring, Node.js, Python], including REST API design.
Expert relational database design in [SQL Server / PostgreSQL / MySQL] (schema design, normalization, indexing, query plans and migrations), plus working knowledge of a non-relational store.
Hands-on caching experience with [Redis or similar], CDNs and HTTP caching, including invalidation strategy.
Daily practice of TDD and automated testing with tools such as [xUnit/NUnit, JUnit, Jest, Playwright or Cypress].
Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines in [GitHub Actions / Azure DevOps / GitLab CI / Jenkins], and deployed to [AWS / Azure] with Docker and infrastructure as code.
Several years in agile teams (Scrum or Kanban), including requirements gathering: running stakeholder sessions and writing user stories, acceptance criteria and specs.
Clear technical writing (architecture docs, API docs, runbooks) and clear communication with non-technical colleagues and customers.
Solid application security fundamentals: OWASP Top 10, OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect, secrets management.

Preferred qualifications

Software for FDA-regulated manufacturing: 21 CFR Part 11 (electronic records and signatures), GAMP 5 and computer system validation.
Integration with manufacturing equipment and instrument data, for example OPC UA, PLC data or machine data acquisition.
Commercial software sold to customers: licensing, customer portals, e-commerce, backward compatibility and support escalations.
Custom AI tooling: MCP servers, agent workflows, AI code-review bots or internal developer assistants.
Search and retrieval over technical content: embeddings, vector databases and hybrid search.
Cloud certification such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect or Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert.
Event-driven systems using message queues or streams such as [RabbitMQ, Kafka, Azure Service Bus, Amazon SQS].
Kubernetes or another container orchestration platform.
Observability platforms such as [Datadog, New Relic, Azure Application Insights, Grafana].
Website platforms such as [WordPress, a headless CMS, or a static-site framework], plus technical SEO.
Background in manufacturing, industrial equipment or pharmaceutical technology.

Proposed compensation (St. Louis, MO)

Post both openings at $135,000–$165,000 base plus a 5–10% target bonus. That prices a senior St. Louis developer with broad product scope and proven AI skills, without a team-lead premium.

Candidate profile

Base salary (USD)

Target bonus

Use when

Senior full-stack, AI-enabled (recommended)

$135,000–$165,000

5–10%

The candidate meets the AI requirements in this description

Senior full-stack, standard

$125,000–$150,000

5–10%

A strong developer with limited AI integration experience

The $150,000 midpoint sits just under the 75th percentile for St. Louis software developers ($156,320) and above the modeled senior full-stack midpoint ($146,500).
The $10,000–$15,000 premium over the standard band pays for proven AI-enabled development skills, which are still scarce. Local pay data for AI skills is thin, so revisit the band after the first round of applicants.
Budget for both hires: $270,000–$330,000 combined base, plus bonus and benefits.
Hire both into the same band and set each offer by skills and experience, so the two peers are paid fairly relative to each other.
Pay toward the top of the band for FDA-regulated software experience (21 CFR Part 11), commercial software experience, or a stack that is hard to hire for locally.
Expected total cash per hire: about $142,000–$182,000.
Other levers if base is tight: a $5,000–$15,000 signing bonus, extra PTO, a $2,000–$5,000 yearly training budget, and paid AI tool subscriptions.

Market benchmarks

Payscale, Built In and Orbyt pages listed under Sources · St. Louis base pay · checked October 2026

Each source reports a different spread, so compare the dots rather than the line lengths. Orbyt's modeled figures run highest; self-reported Payscale and Built In data run lower.

Benefits, work arrangement and EEO statement

Fill in the brackets with your actual plan details.

Medical, dental and vision insurance, with [X]% of premiums paid by Natoli
401(k) with a [X]% company match
[N] days of paid time off plus [N] paid holidays
Annual bonus program (5–10% target for this role)
$[X] yearly professional development budget for courses, certifications and conferences
Company-paid AI development tools and model access
Hybrid schedule: [3] days a week at our St. Charles, MO headquarters, the rest remote
[Paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, home-office equipment]

Work authorization: Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States. [Visa sponsorship is / is not available for this role.]

Equal opportunity: Natoli Engineering Company, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other status protected by law. We provide reasonable accommodations during the hiring process on request.

Notes for the hiring manager

Keep the title at senior individual contributor. Avoid "Lead" or "Manager"; both attract candidates who expect direct reports and a higher band.
Hire for complementary strengths. Both hires must meet the same bar, but one could lean toward back-end, data and equipment integration, the other toward front-end, customer portals and natoli.com.
Explain the two-person structure. Tell candidates how the two developers will split ownership and how decisions get made with the Head of IT, since neither one leads.
Test AI skills directly. Add a live exercise: a small task in a sample codebase using the candidate's own AI tools, then ask how they checked the output. Keep a system-design session, a real pull-request review and a requirements role-play with a non-technical stakeholder.
Trim the must-haves. The required list has 15 items; move anything you would waive for a great hire into Preferred.
Fill every bracket. Your real stack and tools help candidates self-select and cut screening time.
Post the range. Missouri does not require salary ranges in job posts. Illinois does for employers with 15+ employees when the job may be done partly in Illinois, which can apply to hybrid hires living in the Metro East. Confirm with HR or counsel.

Sources

Natoli Engineering home page (products, software and locations)
Payscale: Lead Software Engineer, experienced, St. Louis (19 profiles; updated March 2025)
Built In: Lead Software Engineer, St. Louis (anonymous employee submissions)
Orbyt: Full Stack Developer salaries, St. Louis (modeled estimates, updated August 2026; also reports BLS OEWS May 2025 figures for software developers)

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Full-Stack Senior Developers