Kotlin Engineer Contractor (GenieConnect)

Address United Kingdom

Schedule Full time

Job Type Contract freelancer

Highlights

• Experience with Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP)
• Strategic instinct to think about platform future, not just current tasks

Description

Cera is the UK's largest HealthTech company and one of Europe's fastest-growing businesses - harnessing preventative technology and AI to take care out of Britain's hospitals and into patients' homes. Our 10,000 carers and nurses deliver around 2.5 million patient home visits a month - a volume greater than all A&E attendances across England.

GenieConnect is a startup inside Cera, one of the UK's biggest home care providers. We build a remote care platform (companion robots, a care portal, mobile apps), that helps people live independently at home.The result of our initiatives: 96% medication compliance and around 10 hours of care saved per person per week.

We're a small enabled team shipping a full-stack Kotlin platform (backend, web portal, Android robot app). We want someone who's comfortable with ambiguity, opinionated about quality, and motivated by shipping things that matter to real people - and who's happy pairing and swapping context with a founding engineer and our Ops team rather than working in isolation. Agentic coding is the norm across Cera and our default here: at least 70% of your code should come through Claude Code or equivalent.

About the role

You'll be the second senior engineer on a platform that's already live across local authorities and NHS pathways - pairing directly with the engineer who built it from scratch. The foundation is solid; what's ahead is the more interesting problem: more AI, more scale, new care pathways. You'll help set the engineering direction on a full-stack Kotlin platform, with the autonomy of a startup and the contracts and reach of a major care provider behind you.

Responsibilities

Small team, so you'll touch everything, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the current engineering team:

• Shape the technical roadmap with the existing dev team and the MD - architecture decisions, build-vs buy calls, tooling choices. We make these calls together, not in a vacuum.
• Ship full-stack Kotlin across the backend (APIs, data pipelines, NHS/LA integrations), the care portal (web), and the robot app (Android).
• Sit with ops. Understand how carers and care managers actually use the platform and build from that.
• Integrate AI capabilities like virtual AI calls, predictive alerts and falls detection. We work with AI partners and need someone who can wire it together end to end.
• Push agentic coding practices (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor) so a small team delivers more than its size suggests.
• Keep the lights on: CI/CD, testing, observability, AWS. Small team, so you'll touch everything.

Qualifications and Skills

The codebase is Kotlin Multiplatform and that's where we want the leverage on this contract, so we're looking for a Kotlin-"first" full-stack engineer. Longer term we may be more stack-"agnostic".

Backend: Ktor, Spring Boot, or similar. API design, databases. AWS: CI/CD, containers, infrastructure-as-code. Hands-on.

Frontend: Kotlin/JS, Compose for Web.

Willing to work across the full stack, Android included. You don't need deep mobile experience, but you're up for getting your hands dirty on the robot app when needed.

Strategic instinct. You think about where the platform should be in 12 months, not just what's in the current sprint.

Ops empathy. You care about how the product is deployed and used, and you go looking for that context.

Agentic coding as your default. 70%+ of your daily work already runs through Claude Code, Copilot, or Cursor, and you can point to what that's enabled.

Pace. You ship, you iterate, and you don't wait for permission.

Carriers Real Weight

Regulated industry experience in health tech, social care, or fintech. Not essential, but if you already understand compliance, data governance and audit trails you'll get up to speed faster.

• CQC, NHS Digital, or DTAC frameworks.
• IoT protocols and device management at scale.
• Building LLM-powered features in production and configuration.
• Background in robotics or assistive tech.

Beyond the technical skills, we are looking for:

• AI-native by default. Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor - these are already how you work, not tools you're evaluating. You can point to what they've unlocked for you.
• Ownership instinct. You see a problem and take it. You don't wait to be assigned. Prioritise issues yourself and move them forward without needing handholding.
• Pragmatism. You ship the smallest thing that works, then iterate. Done beats perfect. Prioritise the work that delivers value fastest, then improve it from there.
• Business curiosity. You go find out how the work actually happens, not just how the spec describes it.
• Learning speed. The stack changes. You don't get attached to what you learned last year.
• Low ego. You can be wrong, change course, and give credit where it's due.

Extra qualifications that will make you stand out:

• Regulated industry experience (health tech, social care, fintech, defence). Compliance and audit-aware engineering shortens ramp time.
• Building LLM-powered features in production, evals, drift monitoring, observability.
• Scheduling, matching, or constraint-solving algorithms at production scale.
• Tele-ICU-like, command-center, or supervised-automation systems from any domain.