Senior Software Engineer - Digital Health Platform

About the role

Living Goods is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join its Global Software Engineering team in Nairobi. This is a senior individual-contributor role with team leadership attached, not a move out of engineering: roughly 70% of the time is spent building and 30% leading, though the balance shifts with the team's needs. You will take technical ownership of a product area, lead a small team of engineers and stay hands-on.

Key responsibilities

• Set the technical direction of your product area: architecture, design documentation and recorded decisions.
• Lead a team of two to four engineers, breaking work down, sequencing it and clearing blockers.
• Mentor mid-level engineers through pairing, structured feedback and code review.
• Represent engineering with product managers, programme teams and Ministry of Health stakeholders.
• Own the health of shipped software: CI, releases, test coverage and technical debt.
• Contribute to hiring, onboarding and engineering standards of the wider team.
• Design, develop and maintain an offline-first Android app for community health workers and supervisors.
• Build FHIR-native backend services in Kotlin and Spring Boot, plus Node.js and TypeScript services for authentication and administration.
• Ensure data integrity, security and compliance with Kenya's Data Protection Act and equivalent laws.
• Extend the platform to multiple countries through configuration rather than forks.
• Work with QA engineers, product managers and end users, and log work in the task management system.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, IT, software engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of software development experience, including at least 2 years leading a team or acting as senior engineer.
• Proven track record of shipping and maintaining production software, preferably in digital health.
• Hands-on experience with open-source digital health tools such as FHIR/HL7, CHT, DHIS2, OpenMRS, OpenSRP, CommCare or OpenLMIS is strongly preferred.
• Experience integrating LLM services and messaging channels such as WhatsApp or SMS is a plus.
• Working French is an advantage.

Required skills

• Depth in either the JVM (Kotlin or Java) or TypeScript and Node.js, with willingness to work across both.
• Relational data modelling, schema migration, API design and Git, with CI/CD as daily practice.
• JIRA and Confluence strongly preferred.
• Knowledge of relational and non-relational databases, cloud and containerised hosting.