Junior Software Developer at Ilara Health

About the job Junior Software Developer

At Ilara Health, we equip a network of small, peri-urban healthcare providers with life-saving and essential diagnostic tools to improve the quality of medical care across sub-Saharan Africa. As informal businesses, these clinics and pharmacies lack access to the traditional financial services typically used by SMEs to support their growth. Through smart financing options, Ilara Health connects these small businesses to revenue generating diagnostic assets that enable them to both develop their business and improve the quality of care they provide to their patients.  

About the Role

Ilara Health is participating in a maternal health project run jointly with the Kisumu Ministry of Health and funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aimed at improving antenatal care (ANC) and postnatal care (PNC). Maternal mortality remains a significant public health problem in Kenya; especially in Kisumu County, where the maternal mortality ratio is nearly double the national average. COVID-19 has made provision of ANC/PNC services more difficult and resulted in an increase in negative maternal health outcomes.This is exacerbated by the heightened stigma and fear existing during the pandemic, as patients view health centers as high-risk hot spots for infection. This project aims to improve ANC/PNC services through a decentralised model that leverages Ilara’s diagnostic and telemedicine capabilities to deliver improved care.

You will be working with Ilara’s custom KenyaEMR fork to develop new features, fix issues and provide technical support. KenyaEMR is an essential component of the project and is currently used to collect critical maternal health data as well as to calculate the risk-level of each mother, which could lead to potentially life-saving clinical interventions. You will report to the project’s Senior Software Engineer, as well as the product manager. KenyaEMR is a distribution of OpenMRS. You can view more information on OpenMRS at openmrs.org

Job Responsibilities

• You will primarily be responsible for development of new features for our custom build of KenyaEMR (which is an OpenMRS distribution), as well as upkeep, maintenance and issue resolution for the system.
• Work with Ilara’s project implementation team to respond to  issues and triage feature requests.
• Build and improve integrations between KenyaEMR and the other project software tools.
• Assist with technical support at our participating clinics.
• Debug production issues in KenyaEMR.
• Monitor, maintain and audit our KenyaEMR deployment on Google Cloud Platform.
• Maintain proper documentation.
• Become an expert in OpenMRS.
• Work with SQL scripts to export, import and migrate data between our databases.
• Any other relevant duties as assigned by the product manager, senior software engineer and/or CTO.

Qualifications

• Bachelors or Master’s Degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Math or other technical degree. Equivalent professional experience may also be sufficient.
• 2+ years of experience working with java and key java tools/libraries eg gradle,junit. 
• Experience working with Java Spring framework or any other java web framework.
• Knowledge of Version control tools such as git.
• Experience working with containers is preferred; we use docker.
• Proficient in Linux and MySQL, PostgreSQL or equivalent SQL db.
• Experience working with and deploying to cloud providers eg Gcloud, AWS.
• Ability to pick up new systems and technologies easily.

Behavioral Requirements

• You have entrepreneurial drive, creativity, are resourceful and have a sense of humour.

• You get energy from working with a mission-driven team who are passionate about improving healthcare in Kenya.

Benefits

• Medical Insurance upon successfully completing probation
• Travel reimbursements for travel expenses incurred at work- while going to the field. Please note that this does not cover for daily transportation to the office.
• Working with a team of smart, vibrant and diverse professionals