The Role
Own the technical direction and delivery of a digital health platform product area. Lead two to four engineers while remaining hands-on, developing an offline-first Android application, FHIR-based Kotlin and Spring Boot services, and Node.js/TypeScript systems. Responsibilities include architecture, coding, code review, mentoring, data integrity, security, CI/CD, integrations, production support, stakeholder collaboration, and maintaining software across multiple countries.
Summary Generated by Built In
Senior Software Engineer
Reports to: Senior Manager, Software Engineering.
Location: Nairobi - Kenya
Living Goods endeavours to improve access to essential healthcare services in underserved regions, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. We empower Community Health Workers (CHWs) with digital tools that enable them to deliver door-to-door care. CHWs use a mobile app to track pregnancies, diagnose and treat common infectious diseases like malaria and pneumonia, monitor disease outbreaks, and follow up with families. Real-time data also supports performance monitoring and impact assessment. By integrating tech-based solutions into community health systems, Living Goods fosters better health outcomes, demonstrating the power of digital health in transforming healthcare delivery in resource-constrained settings.
Our Global Software Engineering (GSE) team builds and operates the digital health platform behind that work across Kenya, Uganda and Burkina Faso: the offline-first mobile application community health workers and their supervisors carry into the field, the FHIR-based services behind it, and the integrations that connect it to national health information systems.
As the platform grows across countries and programmes, we need senior engineers who can own a product area end to end - setting its technical direction, leading the engineers building it, and writing a substantial share of the code themselves.
The Opportunity:
Living Goods is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to join our Global Software Engineering team in Nairobi. You will take technical ownership of a product area within the platform, lead a small team of engineers delivering it, and remain hands-on throughout. You will decide how the area is built and record why, break the work down and sequence it, review what the team produces, and grow the engineers around you - while taking the hardest parts of the implementation yourself.
This is a senior individual-contributor role with team leadership attached, not a move out of engineering. We expect roughly seventy percent of your time to be spent building and thirty percent leading, and the balance will shift with what the team is carrying - but building never drops out of it.
Technical Leadership Responsibilities:
A competitive salary and benefits package commensurate with experience including health insurance and bonus opportunity. The opportunity to be your best while making lives better for those in need.
Living Goods is an equal opportunity employer and will consider every qualified applicant for employment. Living Goods does not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, religion, gender, sexual orientation or disability.
Our current job openings are displayed on our website, where you can search for open positions and apply directly. Living Goods does not offer any positions without an interview and never asks candidates for money. If you are asked for money, we strongly recommend that you do not respond and do not send money or personal information. If offered a role at Living Goods, we’ll request consent to complete a background check, which is part of our hiring process.
Reports to: Senior Manager, Software Engineering.
Location: Nairobi - Kenya
Living Goods endeavours to improve access to essential healthcare services in underserved regions, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. We empower Community Health Workers (CHWs) with digital tools that enable them to deliver door-to-door care. CHWs use a mobile app to track pregnancies, diagnose and treat common infectious diseases like malaria and pneumonia, monitor disease outbreaks, and follow up with families. Real-time data also supports performance monitoring and impact assessment. By integrating tech-based solutions into community health systems, Living Goods fosters better health outcomes, demonstrating the power of digital health in transforming healthcare delivery in resource-constrained settings.
Our Global Software Engineering (GSE) team builds and operates the digital health platform behind that work across Kenya, Uganda and Burkina Faso: the offline-first mobile application community health workers and their supervisors carry into the field, the FHIR-based services behind it, and the integrations that connect it to national health information systems.
As the platform grows across countries and programmes, we need senior engineers who can own a product area end to end - setting its technical direction, leading the engineers building it, and writing a substantial share of the code themselves.
The Opportunity:
Living Goods is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to join our Global Software Engineering team in Nairobi. You will take technical ownership of a product area within the platform, lead a small team of engineers delivering it, and remain hands-on throughout. You will decide how the area is built and record why, break the work down and sequence it, review what the team produces, and grow the engineers around you - while taking the hardest parts of the implementation yourself.
This is a senior individual-contributor role with team leadership attached, not a move out of engineering. We expect roughly seventy percent of your time to be spent building and thirty percent leading, and the balance will shift with what the team is carrying - but building never drops out of it.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Strong software design, development and implementation judgement, including familiarity with concepts such as MVC, ORM and RESTful APIs.
- Hands-on experience designing, building and testing mobile and web applications, and the backend services supporting them.
- Good knowledge of relational and non-relational database systems, and of cloud and containerised hosting environments.
- You write a design down before building it, and you can be argued out of a position by evidence.
- Sound judgement about when to build something properly and when to build it thin - and the habit of saying plainly which one you just did.
- Ability to work through ambiguity and deal with shifting priorities; Ministry requirements and programme realities change, sometimes late.
- Effective written and verbal communication, with the ability to engage technical and non-technical stakeholders for brainstorming, designing and rolling out digital health solutions.
- Ability to hold a technical position with a stakeholder without turning it into a standoff.
- Strong customer service orientation, establishing good working relationships with users and passing on knowledge and experience to others.
- Genuine care that the software works for a health worker on a low-end phone with no signal, because that is who it is for.
- Working French is an advantage, for collaboration with our Burkina Faso programme.
A competitive salary and benefits package commensurate with experience including health insurance and bonus opportunity. The opportunity to be your best while making lives better for those in need.
Living Goods is an equal opportunity employer and will consider every qualified applicant for employment. Living Goods does not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, religion, gender, sexual orientation or disability.
Our current job openings are displayed on our website, where you can search for open positions and apply directly. Living Goods does not offer any positions without an interview and never asks candidates for money. If you are asked for money, we strongly recommend that you do not respond and do not send money or personal information. If offered a role at Living Goods, we’ll request consent to complete a background check, which is part of our hiring process.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, IT, software engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 7+ years of professional software development experience
- At least 2 years leading a team or serving as a senior engineer relied upon by other developers
- Strong professional depth in Kotlin or Java, or TypeScript and Node.js, with willingness to work across both technology stacks
- Track record of shipping and maintaining production software, including mobile applications or backend services
- Experience designing, developing, and implementing digital solutions at scale
- Strong relational data modeling, schema migration, and API design experience
- Experience with reliable integration and data exchange between systems
- Fluency with Git, code review, and CI/CD
- Track record of mentoring engineers
- Hands-on experience designing, building, and testing mobile and web applications and backend services
- Knowledge of relational and non-relational databases and cloud and containerized hosting environments
- Strong software design, development, and implementation judgment, including MVC, ORM, and RESTful API concepts
- Effective written and verbal communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Strong customer service orientation and ability to support end users
- Experience in digital health
- Experience with FHIR, HL7, CHT, DHIS2, OpenMRS, OpenSRP, CommCare, or OpenLMIS
- Experience using JIRA and Confluence
- Experience integrating large language model services
- Experience integrating WhatsApp or SMS messaging channels
- Working French
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The Company
What We Do
Living Goods is a non-profit organization that empowers community health workers with digital tools to deliver lifesaving primary healthcare door-to-door. By partnering with governments and leveraging smart mobile technology, they provide essential medicines and training to underserved families, specifically focusing on reducing child mortality and improving health outcomes across Africa through an innovative retail-inspired distribution model.
