Jobs in Port Elizabeth, South Africa

Principal Backend Engineer

The company and our mission:

Zartis is a digital solutions provider working across technology strategy, software engineering and product development.

We partner with firms across financial services, MedTech, media, logistics technology, renewable energy, EdTech, e-commerce, and more. Our engineering hubs in EMEA and LATAM are full of talented professionals delivering business success and digital improvement across application development, software architecture, CI/CD, business intelligence, QA automation, and new technology integrations.

We are looking for a Principal software engineer to work on a project in the healthcare industry.

The project:

Our teammates are talented people that come from a variety of backgrounds. We’re committed to building an inclusive culture based on trust and innovation.

You will be part of a distributed team developing new technologies to solve real business problems and you’ll design and build scalable, high-impact software across both backend and frontend systems.

We are looking for someone with good communication skills, ideally with experience making decisions, being proactive, used to building software from scratch, and with good attention to detail.

• Lead design and implementation of service-oriented architectures, breaking down monoliths into scalable services.
• Develop high-performance data pipelines and APIs for real-time and batch processing.
• Build responsive web applications and internal tools with modern frontend frameworks.
• Collaborate with product and engineering leadership on architecture and system optimization.
• Own and drive technical projects end-to-end, ensuring business alignment and scalability.
• Improve observability, monitoring, and reliability across services, infrastructure, and frontend.
• Mentor and upskill engineers, fostering a strong full-stack engineering culture.
• Apply best practices in service design, data consistency, security, and user experience to ensure compliance.

• 6+ years in backend development (service-oriented architectures)
• Proficient in Python
• Deep knowledge of RESTful and event-driven service design and building responsive, user-friendly web apps.
• Experienced in designing and optimizing data-intensive apps involving large-scale data movement and transformation, with effective UI presentation.
• Strong expertise in performance optimization, reliability engineering, and security across the stack.
• Proven record of mentoring engineers and driving best practices in service/API and frontend development.
• Hands-on with observability, monitoring, and operational excellence in distributed systems and web apps.
• Experienced with relational databases, cloud platforms (AWS preferred), and modern frontend build/deployment pipelines.
• Familiar with data consistency, eventual consistency, database performance tuning, and frontend state management.

• Experience leading major architectural transformations (e.g., monolith-to-SOA).
• Background in regulated industries such as healthcare or fintech.
• Familiarity with compliance standards (HIPAA, SOC2, etc.) with strong focus on privacy and security.
• Experience using AI-enabled development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude) to accelerate productivity.

• 100% Remote Work
• WFH allowance: Monthly payment as financial support for remote working.
• Career Growth: We have established a career development program accessible for all employees with a 360º feedback that will help us to guide you in your career progression.
• Training: For Tech training at Zartis, you have time allocated during the week at your disposal. You can request from a variety of options, such as online courses (from Pluralsight and Educative.io), English classes, books, conferences, and events.
• Mentoring Program: You can become a mentor in Zartis or you can receive mentorship, or both.
• Wellbeing Hub (Kara Connect): A platform that provides sessions with a range of specialists, including mental health professionals, nutritionists, physiotherapists, fitness coaches, and webinars with such professionals as well.
• Multicultural working environment: We organize tech events, webinars, parties, and activities to do online team-building games and contests.