Kotlin Engineer - Full Stack at Cera Care, United Kingdom, £Contractor Rate

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.

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 already 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 fullstack 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 fullstack 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.

Carries 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.

• Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) experience.

• CQC, NHS Digital, or DTAC frameworks.

• IoT protocols and device management at scale.

• Building LLM-powered features in production and configuration.

• Cloud service orchestration experience.

• 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.

These aren't required, but they'll make you stand out:

• Regulated industry experience (health tech, social care, fintech, defence). Compliance and audit-aware engineering shortens ramp time.

• NHS-adjacent stack experience: FHIR UK Core, OMOP, SNOMED CT, GP Connect, DTAC.

• Building LLM-powered features in production, evals, drift monitoring, observability.

• Scheduling, matching, or constraint-solving algorithms at production scale.

• Tele-ICU-like, command-centre, or supervised-automation systems from any domain.