Senior Backend Engineer (NodeJS)

Location: Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria

Department: Product, Data and Engineering

Workplace: hybrid

Employment Type: contract

Description

Helium Health is accelerating Africa’s transition to a technology and data-driven healthcare sector. We provide a suite of solutions that serve as the digital infrastructure for all healthcare stakeholders in Africa: providers, payers, patients & governments.

We are looking to hire a Senior Backend Engineer (NodeJS) who will be responsible for all aspects of the development and delivery of applications. 

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performance backend services using Node.js and TypeScript.
• Develop and maintain RESTful APIs and integrate with internal and third-party services.
• Design and optimize data models and services using PostgreSQL/MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis.
• Build reliable, maintainable, and well-tested software with appropriate unit, integration, and API testing.
• Design and evolve scalable architectures, including microservices and event-driven systems where appropriate.
• Deploy and operate backend services in AWS/cloud environments, working with CI/CD and containerization.
• Monitor and optimize applications for performance, scalability, availability, and reliability.
• Collaborate with Product, Frontend, QA, DevOps, and other teams to deliver high-quality products.
• Participate in code reviews, technical design, and architecture decisions.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to junior and mid-level engineers.
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity, code quality, testing, and problem-solving.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience with 5+ years of professional backend/software engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on experience with Node.js and TypeScript.
• Python experience is a plus, particularly in AI/ML, automation, and data-intensive applications.
• AI-native experience is a strong plus; experience building products or backend services where AI/LLMs are a core part of the product or workflow, including integrating AI APIs, RAG, agents, embeddings, or similar technologies
• Strong experience designing and developing REST APIs and integrate with internal and third-party services.
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases, particularly PostgreSQL/MySQL and MongoDB.
• Experience with infrastructure and deployment tooling 
• Experience with Redis or other caching technologies.
• Good understanding of microservices, distributed systems, and event-driven architecture.
• Experience with AWS/cloud platforms, Docker, Git, and CI/CD.
• Experience with automated testing and writing clean, maintainable, production-ready code.
• Strong understanding of security, authentication, authorization, and API best practices.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, or ChatGPT.

Benefits

Helium Health is an equal opportunity employer, thus it is not biased in its employment to any race, colour, creed, religion, sex or physical disability