Staff Software Engineer (Back-End)

Type: Full-time contractor
Location: Remote (Europe/Africa time zones)
Language: Fluent, professional-level English
Travel: None expected

OpenFn is a Digital Public Good for public service automation and AI orchestration. Our platform automates data exchange and workflows, helping governments and NGOs connect fragmented systems and deliver essential services across health, humanitarian response, and government programmes.

Open Function Group, the platform’s primary steward, is a small, fully remote team of engineers, integration specialists, solution architects, and implementation consultants working across 15+ countries.

We build infrastructure that helps governments function, clinics operate, and people access the services they depend on.

Connecting two government systems should get easier every time. Today, it often means starting again: negotiating access, configuring environments, and deciding who can trust whom. Each new connection becomes another project.
We’re hiring a Staff Back-End Engineer to help change that. You’ll join our Connections squad, with a clear mission: make it dramatically cheaper for government departments to collaborate.

Your work will turn the hard parts of each integration into capabilities teams can use again and again. You’ll define how organisations connect their systems and share credentials, and build the workers that execute their workflows reliably at scale. As OpenFn grows to support everything around those workflows, from setup to monitoring and reporting, you’ll contribute significantly to the architectural direction of our backend.

You’ll have the opportunity to make substantial technical contributions and the responsibility to see them through. Most of your time will be spent in the codebase, with design discussions, code review, and written proposals helping the team build on your work. This is an individual contributor role with no people-management responsibilities.

Our stack is Elixir/Phoenix and Node.js. You’ll need Node.js experience; you can learn Elixir here.

What you’ll do

• Deliver features end to end, from technical proposal to production.
• Build the squad’s core capabilities: connected-system registration and governance, credential ownership and sharing, and high-performance workers that execute workflows reliably at scale.

• Set architectural direction across OpenFn’s backend, including module boundaries, service interfaces, naming, and conventions.
• Establish consistent patterns that help engineers navigate and extend the codebase, including when using AI development tools.
• Set engineering conventions through code review, documentation, and your own work.

• Translate security findings into architectural changes and carry them through to production.
• Strengthen trust boundaries, isolation, and credential handling.

• 8+ years of experience building and operating backend services for customer-facing products.
• Experience designing backend service architectures, not only extending existing ones.
• Experience building backend services with Node.js.
• Experience operating services where reliability and scale have direct consequences for users.
• The ability to work independently and collaborate across time zones in a small, distributed team, using GitHub, Slack, and written proposals.
• Clear, professional communication in English and the ability to work effectively across cultures.

• Elixir/Phoenix or other languages and frameworks designed for functional programming or concurrency.
• Developer tooling or large migration programmes.
• Securing production systems.
• Work in health, humanitarian response, government digital transformation, or the wider social impact sector.
• Working proficiency in Spanish or French.

Compensation and benefits

• Compensation based on experience, following OpenFn’s Equal Pay for Equal Work framework. Our NGO and government customer base means we don’t offer Silicon Valley pay scales; we aim to provide fair, transparent, and competitive pay.
• Flexible working hours.
• Fully remote work, with team meetups across Europe and Africa. Our last three were in Kigali, Cape Town, and Dakar.
• Significant influence on the platform’s architecture and the opportunity to help shape our technical strategy.
• The opportunity to build open source software that helps ensure everyone worldwide can get access to great digital public services.