{"id":1806230,"url":"https://alion.io/job/dis-chem-life-software-engineer","title":"Software Engineer","company":{"id":3880306,"name":"Dis-Chem Life","domain":"dischemlife.co.za","url":"https://alion.io/company/dis-chem-life","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Simplify","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"inferred_company_offices","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["ZA"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":83000,"max_usd":213000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_seniority_cell","sample_n":7270},"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":".NET","optional":false},{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon CloudWatch","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EKS","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon Kinesis","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"API Gateway","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS Lambda","optional":false},{"name":"AWS Step Functions","optional":false},{"name":"C#","optional":false},{"name":"Clean Architecture","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"DynamoDB","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"GraphQL","optional":false},{"name":"gRPC","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kotlin","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Least Privilege","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":false},{"name":"Pact","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Progressive Delivery","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RabbitMQ","optional":false},{"name":"Ray","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"Spring Boot","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon Aurora","optional":true},{"name":"Amazon EC2","optional":true},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"CloudFormation","optional":true},{"name":"IAM","optional":true},{"name":"Terraform","optional":true},{"name":"Zero Trust","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-10-03T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-03","last_verified_at":"2026-10-20T08:14:16Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":382,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":382},"description":"Purpose of the Role:\n At Dis-Chem Life, we are building systems that protect lives, accelerate innovation, and drive digital transformation at scale. As our Software Engineer, you will design and build the core services, platforms, and APIs that power every product we deliver and every life we cover.\nThis is not a role for the average engineer. We are looking for someone who blends elite backend architecture with craftsmanship, operational excellence, and a startup-hardened mindset.\nYour mission: to architect, implement, and operate secure, scalable, and high-performance backend systems that enable faster, safer, and smarter product delivery.\nYou will collaborate with product managers, frontend engineers, backend engineers, data scientists, actuaries, and DevOps to deliver domain-rich services, enable event-driven integrations, and ensure our systems are observable, reliable, and built for change.\nRole Summary\nThis role is responsible for designing, developing, and operating Dis-Chem Life’s backend platforms and services to enable rapid, reliable, and scalable software delivery. The Software Engineer will lead the implementation of domain-driven, cloud-native architectures; define and evolve service boundaries; and deliver high-quality APIs and data pipelines that underpin the resilience and efficiency of our technology landscape.\nTo succeed, you must be highly proficient in backend software design, test driven development, distributed systems, API development, and secure data handling. You will take full ownership of service performance, reliability, code quality, and production operations - ensuring our systems run at enterprise scale while enabling agility and innovation.\nThis role demands a technically strong, self-driven engineer with deep backend experience and the ability to collaborate across engineering, data, and product teams.\nKey Responsibilities\n Backend Architecture and Development\nDesign, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performing backend services and APIs.\nLead the adoption of domain-driven design (DDD), clean architecture, and SOLID principles.\nImplement robust data models and persistence strategies with strong consistency and performance characteristics.\nBuild event-driven and asynchronous workflows using messaging/streaming platforms.\nEstablish API standards, versioning strategies, and documentation practices.\nReliability, Performance and OperationsDrive performance optimisation through profiling, caching, indexing, and query optimisation.\nEmbed observability across services: structured logging, metrics, tracing, SLIs/SLOs, and error budgets.\nChampion testing excellence: unit, property-based, contract, integration, and load testing.\nOwn production readiness: blue/green or canary releases, graceful degradation, and robust rollback paths.\nPartner with SRE/DevOps to ensure secure, automated deployments and operational excellence.\nSecurity and Compliance\nImplement secure coding practices and threat-aware designs (input validation, least privilege, encryption in transit/at rest).\nManage identity, auth, and access patterns (OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, mTLS, fine-grained authorisation).\nEnsure data governance and privacy controls aligned to regulatory and internal standards.\nCollaboration and Delivery\nWork closely with product and stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical designs and iterative delivery plans.\nMentor engineers, conduct code and design reviews, and raise the quality bar across the codebase.\nDrive continuous improvement of engineering practices, tooling, and standards.\nTechnical Skills\nEssential:\nStrong proficiency in one or more backend languages and ecosystems (e.g., Java/Kotlin with Spring Boot, C#/.NET, Go, or Python/FastAPI).\nDeep experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs and building resilient, idempotent endpoints; exposure to gRPC or GraphQL.\nStrong understanding of distributed systems concepts: consistency, partitioning, resiliency patterns (circuit breakers, retries, backoff), eventual consistency.\nData stores: relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and at least one NoSQL store (e.g., DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis); schema design, indexing, and migration strategies.\nMessaging and streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, SQS/SNS, RabbitMQ) and event-driven architecture.\nTesting: unit, integration, contract (e.g., Pact), end-to-end, and performance/load testing.\nObservability: metrics, logs, and tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, CloudWatch/X-Ray).\nSecure development practices, secrets management, and API security patterns.\nComfortable with containerisation (Docker) and deploying to Kubernetes/EKS or equivalent.\nBeneficial:\nExperience with CQRS and event sourcing where appropriate.\nKnowledge of caching layers and patterns (Redis, CDN, application-level caches).\nExperience with feature flags, canary releasing, and progressive delivery.\nExposure to serverless components (e.g., AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions) and microservices at scale.\nFamiliarity with data pipelines and analytics integrations for downstream consumers.\nUnderstanding of financial services domains or actuarial/data integrations.\nSoft Skills\nOwnership-driven, autonomous, and accountable.\nThrives in fast-paced, entrepreneurial environments; bias for action and outcomes.\nExceptional problem-solving with a performance and reliability mindset.\nStrong written and verbal communication; able to collaborate across technical and non-technical teams.\nPassionate about craftsmanship, documentation, and continuous improvement.\nExperience\n6+ years’ experience building and operating backend systems in production.\nProven track record designing and maintaining high-scale, mission-critical services in cloud environments (AWS preferred).\nExperience delivering greenfield systems and evolving legacy platforms incrementally.\nDemonstrated impact in agile, product-led, high-stakes settings.\nPrior experience in regulated or financial services environments is advantageous.\nQualifications\nBachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent practical experience).\nRelevant certifications beneficial (e.g., AWS Certified Developer/Solutions Architect; domain-specific security certifications).\nNice-to-Have AWS Alignment\nServices: EC2, EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, ALB/NLB, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, Kinesis, ElastiCache/Redis, Secrets Manager, Cognito, CloudWatch, X-Ray.\nPractices: Infrastructure-as-Code collaboration with DevOps (Terraform/CloudFormation), cost-aware designs, and security-first architectures aligned to CIS and IAM best practices.\nWhat Success Looks Like\nMeasurable improvements in latency, throughput, and error rates against defined SLOs.\nClearly defined and documented service boundaries with stable, versioned APIs.\nRobust test coverage and automated quality gates in CI/CD.\nZero-trust principles applied across services with least-privilege access and strong auditability.\nPredictable, low-risk deployments and fast, reliable incident recovery.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7081,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":true},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"South Africa","iso":"ZA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-03T19:21:38Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":5,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.164,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":382,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/dis-chem-life-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/dis-chem-life-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-20T08:35:34Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":9365,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-21T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":3880306},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3880306"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fdis-chem-life-software-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fdis-chem-life-software-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fdis-chem-life-software-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/dis-chem-life-software-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fdis-chem-life-software-engineer"}]}