Freelance Remote Plant Science Jobs in Utah (NOW HIRING)

We are an ITAR-regulated company. To be considered for employment with us, you must be either a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

This role requires approximately 40% domestic and international travel during the first year. Travel is primarily intended to build relationships, understand plant operations, and develop solutions alongside the people who will use them. The employee will have meaningful autonomy in planning travel based on business needs, project schedules, and coordination with plant and functional partners. As relationships and working practices become established, travel may decrease during the second year.

Salary range is subject to location, as this role can be remote.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support, production applications and AI-enabled solutions using custom code, APIs, cloud services, databases, integrations, and approved enterprise platforms.
• Serve as a technical guide for business teams, working together to build solutions with the people who will use them.
• Provide strong, hands-on guidance as users participate in solution design, prototyping, testing, refinement, and deployment. Help users make sound decisions while ensuring the resulting solutions meet enterprise technical and governance standards.
• Manage solution delivery from initial discovery, through deployment, and early-life support, including scope, requirements, priorities, timelines, responsibilities, risks, testing, communication, and handoff.
• Write clean, maintainable, secure, testable, and documented code using disciplined software engineering practices such as source control, code review, testing, deployment, monitoring, and production support.
• Translate business and operational needs into technical designs, prototypes, working software, and scalable production applications.
• Build application components across the front end, service tier, APIs, integrations, automation workflows, and data layer as required by each solution.
• Diagnose defects, troubleshoot production issues, refactor prototypes, and harden internally developed or user-built solutions, for secure and supportable enterprise use.
• Review and validate AI-generated code for correctness, security, maintainability, performance, and production readiness.
• Establish reusable components, deployment patterns, templates, documentation, and support practices so successful solutions can be repeated across functions and manufacturing sites.
• Partner with IT architecture, security, infrastructure, data, and application teams, to ensure solutions meet enterprise standards for identity, access, data protection, logging, resiliency, integration, and responsible AI use.
• Support citizen developers and solution owners by establishing guardrails, providing technical coaching, and helping viable user-built solutions, move into governed production environments.

Job Requirements

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, Engineering, or a closely related technical field required.
• Equivalent professional software development experience may be considered in place of a degree.

Required Experience

• Three or more years of progressive work experience in information technology, automation, business systems, manufacturing technology, analytics, software delivery, AI enablement, or a related field, including demonstrated hands-on experience building, deploying, and supporting production applications or enterprise solutions.
• Three to five years of hands-on experience working as a software developer or software engineer, with demonstrated experience shipping working code into business or operational environments.
• Demonstrated ability to independently read, write, debug, modify, and explain production-quality code.
• Strong practical development experience using Python and/or TypeScript, including front-end, service-tier, API, automation, scripting, and integration work.
• Experience working with disciplined software development practices, including Git, branching, pull requests, code review, testing, deployment, documentation, monitoring, and production support.
• Experience consuming, developing, securing, and troubleshooting REST APIs or comparable integration interfaces.
• Experience debugging applications through code analysis, logging, error handling, testing, and systematic problem diagnosis.
• Working knowledge of application security, authentication, authorization, secrets management, error handling, data protection, and secure development practices.
• Ability to assess AI-generated code and determine whether it is correct, secure, maintainable, and appropriate for production use.
• Experience working directly with business stakeholders to identify process-improvement opportunities and translate them into practical technical solutions.
• Experience working across cross-functional initiatives in a multi-site or global environment preferred.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools, Azure-hosted applications, Databricks, manufacturing systems, HMI/SCADA, PLC-adjacent workflows, or plant automation environments preferred.

Preferred Certifications

• Relevant Microsoft, Azure, software development, cloud, AI, Databricks, automation, or application-development certifications preferred.

Interview Process

As part of the interview process, candidates will complete a short, straightforward live coding exercise in a programming language of their choice. The exercise is designed to confirm the ability to read, understand, debug, and write basic code. It is not intended to assess algorithm memorization or advanced computer science concepts.