Aspire Software is looking for a AI Developer to join our team in Lebanon.
Here is a little window into our company: Aspire Software operates and manages wholly owned software companies, providing mission-critical solutions across multiple verticals. By implementing industry best practices, Aspire delivers a time sensitive integration process, and the operation of a decentralized model has allowed it to become a hub for creating rapid growth by reinvesting in its portfolio.
About the job:
We are deliberately looking for someone who has not worked in COBOL before. The goal is for you to learn the core directly from our senior engineer, in his way, without competing habits to unlearn, so the knowledge transfers cleanly and intact. Your modern engineering instincts are what you bring; the COBOL you will learn from the person who knows it best.
This is also why we are looking for an engineer who works fluently with AI. Once you understand how the core actually behaves, modern AI tooling becomes a force-multiplier for documenting it, reasoning about it, and ultimately migrating it to a modern stack. Deep system knowledge and strong AI capability are the two halves of how this modernisation actually gets done, and we expect this hire to bring the second from day one and build the first here.
If the idea of going deep into a complex, valuable, decades-old system, and emerging as one of the few people in the world who genuinely understands it, sounds like your kind of challenge, we want to talk to you.
In your first six months
- Spend a meaningful proportion of your time learning our COBOL core in structured sessions with our senior platform engineer. This is protected time, treated as part of the role, not something you do around other work.
- Contribute to modern Go services in the stack from week one, on scoped pieces of work that build context without putting you on the critical path.
- Help us document what you’re learning as you learn it. Fresh eyes are uniquely valuable for surfacing the things long-tenured engineers no longer notice.
- Pair with the existing team across the stack to understand how Go services, the COBOL core, and the surrounding tooling actually interact in production.
- Use AI tooling deliberately as part of how you learn: to summarise unfamiliar code, surface questions for your mentor, and turn what you learn into clear documentation faster than fresh eyes could alone.
Beyond six months
- Take ownership of meaningful work across both the modern and legacy halves of the platform, with growing autonomy.
- Help repair and modernise core engineering processes: testing, deployment, definition of done, and the way work flows from support into engineering.
- Contribute to the broader modernisation program: knowledge capture, internal AI tooling, and the eventual decomposition of the platform into smaller, more approachable modules.
- Lead AI-assisted modernisation of the parts of the core you have come to understand, translating well-understood COBOL into well-tested modern services, with AI as a lever rather than a crutch.
- Own projects end to end. Work starts from a client-facing Design Doc that describes data flow and outcomes but not detailed technical specs; from there you own the technical design, the implementation, your own alpha testing, and everything in between.
- Adapt to the business. Priorities can shift at short notice when urgent client issues arise, and you will be expected to flex with them.
- Mentor the next Go-into-COBOL hire as the team grows.
Requirements
- 4–7 years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time writing production Go.
- Comfortable working in a large, complex codebase where the answer is rarely on Stack Overflow. You enjoy reading code more than you fear it.
- Strong fundamentals: data structures, concurrency, debugging, designing for failure modes. Language familiarity matters less than the habits of mind.
- Demonstrable, judgment-led fluency with AI in a real engineering workflow. You use AI tools daily to read and understand unfamiliar code, accelerate routine work, and draft documentation, and you can explain clearly where you trust their output and where you don’t. We care less about which tools you use than about the judgement you bring to using them. This is a hard requirement for the role.
- The interpersonal maturity to learn directly from a highly experienced, exacting mentor. You can build trust, adapt to an established way of working, and absorb knowledge patiently, rather than rushing to impose your own approach before you understand why things are the way they are.
- A genuine willingness, ideally an active interest, in learning COBOL and working in a heritage system. This is not a stepping stone to a pure greenfield role; the COBOL work is the role. No prior COBOL experience is expected or needed; you will learn it here, from the person who knows it best.
- Strong written communication. You will be helping us turn tribal knowledge into durable documentation.
- Comfortable with ambiguity. The codebase has decades of history, the documentation is improving but not yet complete, and you will sometimes need to figure things out by reading and asking rather than by looking them up.
- Based in a UK/EMEA timezone and able to commit to a consistent daily overlap with California (Pacific) working hours. This is a genuine requirement of the role, not a preference: you will be learning directly from our retiring senior, who is based there, so dependable shared hours are essential. You will also keep reliable overlap with the rest of the UK/EMEA team.
- Comfortable owning the full development cycle and shifting priorities when needed. You will own projects end to end (see What you’ll do), and you will sometimes need to reprioritise at short notice for urgent client work. These are the two things new hires here most often underestimate.
Strong indicators
- Experience working with or alongside legacy systems: mainframe, monolithic, or otherwise long-lived. You understand that “legacy” often means “load-bearing” and treat it with appropriate respect.
- Experience in domains with deep business logic (finance, logistics, telecoms, insurance, ERP, or similar) where correctness matters more than ergonomics.
- Comfortable in polyglot environments. Our stack includes Go, the COBOL core, and a long tail of supporting languages and platforms accumulated over years.
- Track record of improving the engineering practices around you (testing discipline, deployment hygiene, documentation, onboarding) rather than just shipping features.
- Experience pairing closely with a more senior engineer and absorbing knowledge from them.
- Experience building or working with AI-assisted developer tooling in a serious production context: agents, code generation, retrieval over large codebases, or similar. You have opinions, grounded in real use, about where it earns its keep.
Nice to have
- Experience with car rental, fleet, travel, hospitality, or other operationally complex industries.
- Experience contributing to a platform modernisation, replatforming, or legacy-to-modern migration program.
- Familiarity with Perl or PostScript. Parts of the surrounding toolchain still touch both; not a blocker at all if you have not used them, but real exposure is a genuine plus.
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