SaaS development in Boston
A SaaS product sold to Boston's hospitals and pharmaceutical companies is bought twice: once by the team that wants it, and again by the IT and quality teams who have to roll it out. The second purchase is where products stall. Customers ask for single sign-on through their identity provider, users provisioned and removed automatically, a history of changes they can export, their data kept apart from other customers', and evidence that the system does what its specification says.
We build the multi-tenant foundations those teams test. Tenant isolation is enforced in the database rather than trusted to each query, SSO and directory provisioning come through a provider, change records are written by the system and cannot be edited by users, and a customer that needs its own database can move without an application rewrite. Specifications and tests are written alongside the code, so the evidence a quality team asks for already exists when they ask.
Boston's software buyers mostly work in science, medicine, education and money: biotech and pharmaceutical companies in Cambridge and the Seaport, the hospital systems, digital health start-ups, the universities and the companies spun out of them, and the asset managers and insurers downtown. In most of them, software supports something else, an experiment, a patient or a portfolio. The people who commission it are often scientists and clinicians, many of whom write some code themselves and know exactly what they need the data to do. What they want from an engineer is not a new idea. It is the idea they already have, made reliable.
The work follows the science. Biotech labs need instrument output picked up as it lands and linked to the notebook entry that explains it, and internal tools that stay fast on thousands of assay results. Digital health companies need a backend that can read from a hospital's records system, and patient apps that save offline and keep the time each entry was made. Edtech companies selling to universities need platforms that know a teaching assistant from a department administrator. Lab suppliers need commerce that runs on purchase orders and negotiated prices, and the investment firms downtown need internal tools to replace the workbooks that run their operations.
Hiring has its own shape. Built In puts the average software engineer base salary in Boston at about $137,000, and the city's engineers are pulled between big tech offices, well-funded biotech and university spin-outs. The universities keep research talent in good supply. What teams more often lack is someone who has taken a system from a notebook or a prototype to something that runs unattended, is monitored, and survives its author going back to the lab. That gap, between a result that works once and a system that keeps working, is where we are most useful.
We are in Bengaluru and move our working day for Boston. Four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Eastern time, stand-up included, so questions, reviews and decisions happen live with the engineer who writes the code. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so the system keeps running when the people who commissioned it go back to the lab.
We are the right fit for the gap between a result that works once and a system that keeps working: a pipeline, a hospital integration, a patient app, an internal tool. Senior capacity starts within days, the first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement, and it can carry you from a funding round or grant to your first engineering hire.
Four ways this arrives.
Then SCIM, then role mapping, then a security questionnaire. We add SAML and OIDC through a provider or your own identity stack, provision users from their directory, and keep the permission model working for the self-serve customers who never asked for any of it.
Shared tables with a tenant column and every query trusted to filter on it. We enforce isolation below the application, with Postgres row-level security or separate schemas, and write tests that try to read across tenants and must fail.
Moving from seats to usage, adding a free tier, or selling annual contracts beside monthly plans. We model plans and entitlements separately from the payment provider, meter usage into a ledger you can audit, and make proration and dunning tested code rather than a monthly surprise.
Every larger customer asks who changed what, who can reach production and how access ends when someone leaves. We build exportable audit logs, least-privilege access and change control through pull requests, so your answer is a screen, not a spreadsheet.
A multi-tenant platform scoped per organisation, with admin screens for users, access and login alerts, and a way for an administrator to view the app as any user.
Read the write-up →Asked by Boston teams.
How do you work with teams in Boston?+
We are in Bengaluru and move our working day for Boston, so four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Eastern time, stand-up included. We join your Slack, push to your GitHub and track the work in your Linear, so progress shows up where your team already looks. The person on every call is the engineer who writes the code, whether you are a scientist, a clinician or a CTO.
Do you build for Boston's biotech and life sciences companies?+
Yes. The work is usually the software around the science: pipelines that pick up plate reader, sequencer and imaging output as it lands and link it to the notebook entry, internal tools that stay fast on thousands of assay results, and search over protocols and SOPs that always cites the current version. We work alongside your computational scientists, turning what already works in their notebooks into systems that run unattended.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Boston?+
Built In puts the average software engineer base salary in Boston at about $137,000, before bonus and benefits. Our published rate is $35/hour, or $5,400 a month for an embedded engineer, with a $5,000 minimum. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work starts within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you judge us on what it produces.
What do the first two weeks look like?+
You share the context: the code, the data and the problem. Within two days you have a 30-minute call with the engineer who would do the work, and within a week a written plan. Then comes a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800, such as turning one notebook or prototype into something that runs on its own. At the end you have working code in your repository, notes on how it runs, and a clear view of what comes next.
Shared database, separate schemas, or a database per tenant?+
Shared tables with row-level security for most products, because it is the cheapest to run and the simplest to migrate. Separate schemas or databases when a customer contractually needs isolation, data kept in a particular region, or its own backup schedule. We design so a large tenant can move to its own database later without rewriting the application, because that request usually arrives with the biggest contract.
When should we add SSO and SCIM?+
Before the deal that needs them, not in the first month. Design the user and organisation model so SSO slots in without a data migration, then switch it on when a paying customer asks. A provider such as WorkOS saves you building SAML and SCIM yourself, which rarely pays off until enterprise customers are a large share of your revenue.
Stripe, or a merchant of record like Paddle?+
Stripe gives you the most control over plans, invoices and the checkout. A merchant of record such as Paddle takes a larger fee and becomes the seller, handling tax wherever you sell. For a small team selling internationally from the start, the merchant of record is often the simpler path. We lay out both at your price point before you choose.
Can you make the product ready for enterprise buyers?+
Yes. Enterprise buyers ask for the same things every time: single sign-on, directory provisioning, roles they can define, an audit log they can export, and admin screens their IT team can use. We design those into the data model early, so saying yes to the next large customer is a configuration change rather than a quarter of rework.
What have you built that carries over to SaaS?+
Multi-tenancy, per-organisation access and admin tooling run through most of what we build. FM360 is a multi-tenant platform with all three: organisations, apps and access managed per customer, usage analytics and login alerts. Subscriptions and billing logic we build inside the product, tested like any other code rather than left to a dashboard.