Team Lead Java Engineer

On behalf of our Client, Mobilunity is looking for a Java Backend Engineering Team Lead.

Our client is a high-growth, award-winning African nonprofit on a mission to radically transform healthcare access. The organization works to strengthen the potential and resilience of adolescent girls across Africa by building local health ecosystems that provide stigma-free, no-cost, quality-assured healthcare services.

Their technology platform connects community organizations, healthcare providers, and retail partners by enabling referrals, verifying service delivery, facilitating payments, and generating real-time data.

The organization operates across Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Burkina Faso, South Africa, and Nigeria, with additional offices in Portugal, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The global team consists of more than 250 international colleagues and works in a fast-paced, informal, and collaborative environment.

The role focuses on one of the organization’s critical scaling challenges: risk and fraud on the platform. It combines strong software engineering and data infrastructure skills with deep hands-on experience building and deploying modern AI and LLM-based systems in production.

Key Responsibilities:

Team Leadership

• Lead, support, and develop the individuals within the software engineering team.
• Coordinate the team’s engineering work and help ensure priorities and deliverables are effectively managed.
• Conduct team performance reviews and support the professional development of team members.
• Foster a collaborative environment focused on engineering quality, continuous learning, and knowledge sharing.

Software Development

• Maintain and develop new features for the software platform.
• Apply software engineering principles across the design, development, maintenance, testing, and evaluation of software.
• Contribute hands-on to building scalable and maintainable backend systems.
• Ensure that software developed by the team meets appropriate security and data protection requirements.
• Participate in Agile rituals and development practices.
• Document technical work clearly and ensure that documentation is understandable and useful for future maintenance.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience focused on JVM languages.
• 2+ years of formal leadership experience managing a team of Java backend engineers.
• Experience conducting team performance reviews and supporting the development of engineering team members.
• Strong hands-on experience with Java and the Spring framework.
• Extensive experience with Java backend tools and frameworks.
• Experience working with microservices architecture.
• Hands-on experience with AWS.
• Proven experience building software from the ground up.
• Strong understanding of software engineering principles, with a focus on quality, scalability, and maintainability.
• Strong problem-solving and logical-thinking skills.
• Experience working in an Agile software development environment.
• Good understanding of software security and data protection.
• Excellent spoken and written English.

Nice to Have:

• Experience or knowledge of Salesforce CRM.
• Experience working on high-growth technology platforms.
• Experience working with international and distributed engineering teams.
• Experience contributing to technical strategy and continuous improvement beyond day-to-day development.
• Currently based in Portugal.