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: 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…