Senior PowerBuilder Developer - Application Modernization

About the role

Aberdeen Advisors is seeking an experienced PowerBuilder developer to support the modernization of a dental practice management platform. The project will move business logic and direct database access from existing applications into shared services exposed through ASP.NET Core APIs, while preserving the current screens and workflows.

You will work with architects, .NET developers, database engineers, and the client's engineering and QA teams to assess legacy code and migrate functionality incrementally.

Responsibilities

• Analyze existing PowerBuilder applications, including PowerScript, embedded SQL, dynamic SQL, DataWindows, DataStores, and reports.
• Identify business rules, database dependencies, transaction boundaries, and functionality shared with other clients or services.
• Work with backend engineers to extract business capabilities into shared application services.
• Modify PowerBuilder applications to consume APIs and populate DataWindows through service responses.
• Preserve existing validation, workflows, error handling, and user-visible behavior during migration.
• Develop reusable PowerBuilder components for API calls, authentication, serialization, and response handling.
• Identify DataWindow retrieval and update behavior, locking patterns, and commit/rollback dependencies.
• Support incremental releases, configuration-controlled cutover, and safe fallback to legacy paths.
• Investigate defects and performance differences with database engineers and QA.
• Document dependencies, conversion patterns, and completed migrations.

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of application development experience, including 5+ years of hands-on PowerBuilder development.
• Strong knowledge of PowerScript, nonvisual objects, inheritance, events, DataWindows, and DataStores.
• Experience maintaining complex client-server applications with substantial database interaction.
• Strong SQL skills and experience with embedded SQL, stored procedures, and transaction management.
• Hands-on experience integrating PowerBuilder applications with REST APIs and JSON.
• Ability to trace business logic across UI code, reusable objects, and database routines.
• Experience diagnosing application performance, concurrency, and data-integrity issues.
• Familiarity with Git, code reviews, and structured release processes.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to collaborate with distributed engineering teams.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with Sybase SQL Anywhere, particularly locking, isolation, stored procedures, and query tuning.
• Experience extracting business logic and database access from PowerBuilder into .NET services.
• Familiarity with ASP.NET Core APIs, C#, or WCF integrations.
• Experience modernizing reports and replacing direct DataWindow database access.
• Experience with accounting, payments, insurance claims, healthcare, or other