Senior Software Engineer

Maisha Meds is hiring! We’re looking for an experienced software engineer to improve health care in East Africa!

Maisha Meds is an organization dedicated to improving health care in Africa. We began full-time operations in 2017 and over the past few years has grown to support over 1.5million patient encounters annually across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, and Zambia with our suite of software products. Our focus is increasingly on helping global health funders pay for health outcomes at the last mile, with a focus on malaria case management (and results from a RCT with UC Berkeley due out later this year), injectable contraceptives, HIV self tests, prenatal care, and COVID testing and vaccination.

Our work is funded by USAID Development Innovation Ventures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, Pfizer, and others, and we are starting to build partnerships with larger global health funders, pharmaceutical companies, and national health insurance funds. We use data from our point of sale software to design programs that leverage financial incentives to improve uptake of high impact health products at the last mile. And we measure our success by our ability to improve the quality and affordability of healthcare diagnosis, treatment, and prevention for low-income patients across Africa.

What We’re Looking For

We’re entering an exciting new phase of our loyalty program and are looking for a strong lead. Not only are we collaborating with researchers, we’re aiming to expand this program to multiple countries this year! We would like the lead to scope the backend and web-based work and deliver on the project, with the support of the tech team.

We’re looking for an engineer (preferably experienced in Ruby on Rails) to collaborate with our tech team, lead development for new and exciting features.

The ideal candidate has:

  • 4+ years of building quality applications,
  • A history of writing clean and well-documented code with automated tests,
  • Experience building REST APIs,
  • Ability to scope large, abstract problems to small, concrete tasks
  • Excellent communication skills and the ability to work well with a culturally diverse team (we’re a mix of Kenyans and international team members)
  • Experience building systems for environments with limited or intermittent Internet connectivity is a plus

Our preferred technology:

  • Ruby on Rails
  • React and Vue.js

Our headquarters is in Kisumu, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Many members of our organization are remote across Kenya and internationally, especially on the tech team. We were remote before COVID and we’d certainly be open to remote work afterwards. We would love to have you join us on-site in Kisumu (for a flexible amount of time) once it’s safe to travel again. We also offer competitive benefits, including health insurance, 401(k) / pension, competitive salary and potential stock options, and sponsorship for work visas in Kenya.

We’re a small, friendly team that values open communication and mentorship.

Maisha Meds is building a digital pharmaceutical benefits manager for essential health products in low- and middle-income countries to improve access to affordable, high-quality, and appropriate medications for the bottom of the pyramid. In our first two years of full-time operations, we have built a network of 350+ clinics and pharmacies in Kenya that leverage our software to support 130,000+ patients monthly, and we anticipate that we will grow to support several thousands of sites in the next two years. Our platform is used to develop a last-mile pharmacy network, manage medication supply chains, pool resources to negotiate better prices for patients, deliver reimbursement for care via mobile money, and verify identity to ensure that patients are receiving the right products at the right prices. We are working to streamline distribution and improve transparency in an environment where an estimated 25-40% of the $37bil in development assistance for health is wasted annually, 10-20% of medication is poor quality, and patients pay cash for the majority of their healthcare. We partner with global health funders and pharmaceutical companies to do this.