About the job

Backend Engineer (Health Data Systems)

Company: Afya

Type: Remote | Short-term Contract / Part-time (possibility of full-time)

Compensation: Competitive

About Afya

Afya is an emerging digital health platform focused on enabling secure, seamless health data exchange across Africa. We are rethinking how health information systems communicate, building tools that bridge fragmented healthcare infrastructures while maintaining privacy, speed, and reliability.

Our team is small but deeply technical. We thrive on open-ended problem solving, deep reasoning, and independent exploration, qualities that define our engineering culture.

Role Overview

We are looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to design and implement next-generation data transmission systems.

You’ll take inspiration from our existing approaches, including our internal prototypes and prior work discussed with our lead engineer, but will have complete freedom to test new ideas, architectures, and routing logic.

This is a role for someone who enjoys figuring things out, not just following specs. You’ll experiment, iterate, and collaborate directly with our core team to design a more adaptive, efficient, and intelligent routing layer for healthcare data.

What You’ll Do

• Architect and implement dynamic routing logics for complex systems to adapt them to changing network and data conditions.
• Integrate routing intelligence with existing core APIs and middleware components.
• Design modular, testable, and scalable backend code that can evolve over time.
• Collaborate with system architects to validate assumptions, measure performance, and refine routing strategies.
• Document key design decisions and contribute to a maintainable, open architecture.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong backend engineering experience in Node.js, Python (FastAPI/Flask), Go, or similar.
• Proven experience designing or contributing to data integration, API middleware, or message routing systems.
• Solid understanding of RESTful APIs, message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.), and microservice orchestration.
• Interest in health data systems, interoperability, or OpenHIM/OpenHIE ecosystems is a plus.
• A creative, self-directed mindset, you’re comfortable exploring, making mistakes, and iterating quickly.
• Ability to reason deeply about systems architecture and trade-offs.

Why You’ll Love Working with Us

• You’ll work directly with the founding and engineering team behind Afya’s interoperability infrastructure.
• You’ll have freedom to shape your own technical direction.
• You’ll be building something that matters, infrastructure that enables doctors, hospitals, and systems to share life-saving data across borders.

How to Apply

Send your CV, GitHub, portfolio, and a short note about your past work with dynamic systems or similar to tchiosekale6@gmail.com with the subject “Afya Backend Engineer Application”