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.

The role

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

Ship production features
- 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.

Shape OpenFn’s backend architecture
- 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.

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