Senior Software Engineer

Key responsibilities

• Technical Leadership Responsibilities:.
• Set the technical direction for your product area: decide the architecture, write the design down before the first ticket is cut, and record the decisions and the reasoning behind them.
• Lead a team of two to four engineers – break work down, sequence it against real dependencies, and clear what is blocking other people before your own tasks.
• Use code review as the primary teaching instrument: raise the standard of what gets merged and leave the author better prepared for the next change.
• Mentor and grow mid-level Software engineers through pairing, structured feedback and handing over work that stretches them.
• Represent engineering with product managers, programme teams and Ministry of Health stakeholders – translating constraints into plans, and deadlines into honest scope conversations.
• Own the health of what your team ships: dependable CI, uneventful releases, test coverage where it earns its keep, and technical debt named openly rather than absorbed quietly.
• Contribute to hiring, technical onboarding and the engineering standards of the wider GSE team.
• Engineering Responsibilities:.
• Design, develop and maintain the offline-first Android application used by community health workers and supervisors, where connectivity is intermittent and losing a record is not acceptable.
• Design and build FHIR-native backend services – Kotlin and Spring Boot batch jobs that generate work, score submissions and produce reports, alongside Node. js and TypeScript services for authentication and administration.
• Build and safeguard data integrity across devices: sync conflict resolution, append-only clinical records, provenance for every merge, and deterministic identity across systems.
• Protect the clinical and personal data the platform holds: least-privilege access, encryption in transit and at rest, an auditable change history, and compliance with Kenya’s Data Protection Act and equivalent law in the countries we operate in.
• Extend the platform to serve multiple countries through configuration rather than forks, accommodating different health system hierarchies, roles, languages and programme rules.
• Carry features end to end – specification, implementation, review, release, and field support when something behaves unexpectedly on a device you have never held.
• Work with QA Engineers on validation and verification testing, and with product managers to translate complex requirements into workable software.
• Support Ministry of Health, county and programme end users on arising technical issues alongside the technical support team, resolving or escalating and following through to resolution.
• Log development activity in the task management system and report progress, milestones and blockers in team ceremonies.

Candidate requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, IT, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ Years of professional software development experience, including at least 2 years leading a team or serving as the senior engineer other developers depended on.
• Demonstrated depth in either the JVM (Kotlin or Java) or TypeScript and Node. js, with the willingness to work across both – our platform is not single-language and neither is this role.
• Proven track record of shipping and then maintaining production software: a mobile application with real users in the field, or backend services carrying meaningful load.
• Hands-on experience designing, developing and implementing fit-for-purpose digital solutions at scale, preferably in the digital health space.
• Strong relational data modelling, schema migration and API design, including integration techniques for reliable communication and data exchange between systems.
• Fluency with version control (Git), code review and CI/CD as daily practice. Use of project management tools such as JIRA and Confluence is strongly preferred.
• A track record of mentoring engineers, with specific examples you can talk through.
• Hands-on experience with open-source digital global goods such as FHIR/HL7, CHT, DHIS2, OpenMRS, OpenSRP, CommCare or OpenLMIS will be strongly preferred.
• Experience integrating large language model services, and messaging channels such as WhatsApp or SMS, is a plus.

Required skills