Contractor Brief: Kotlin Developer for Backend API Enhancements
Who We Are:
Alike is a charity with one simple mission: To end the loneliness and isolation that people impacted by cancer experience. We exist to empower our community to make meaningful connections through seamless digital experiences which help people find their sense of belonging.
Driven by our mission and inspired by the start-up mentality, we operate with agility and pace. In 2021, we launched our ground-breaking native iOS and Android app as a space exclusively for the cancer community to connect. Now we’re looking to scale nationwide with our rebuilt React Native app. Alike is the only non-for-profit organisation providing a large scale, tailored peer support platform across all ages and diagnoses, whether someone’s facing a sleepless night or a lonely weekend.
Scope of Work:
We are seeking an experienced Kotlin Developer to join our team on a contract basis to work on enhancing and reworking key features of our existing backend API. The API is hosted in an AWS environment and serves as the core infrastructure for our application. This position will primarily focus on making minor updates to the existing API, particularly the ability to filter some existing endpoints, and ensuring seamless integration with our AWS environment.
What We're Looking For:
The ideal contractor will have strong expertise in backend development using Kotlin, with experience building and maintaining APIs in an AWS-hosted environment. You should be comfortable working with existing codebases, identifying opportunities for improvement, and implementing changes in a way that ensures system stability, performance, and scalability.
Key Deliverables:
* Rework Existing API Endpoints - Modify and optimise existing API endpoints to support additional filtering capabilities and improve overall functionality.
* AWS Integration & Deployment - Work with our AWS environment for API
* deployment, leveraging AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and other relevant services.
* Database Integration - Interface with our RDS (Relational Database Service) to
* ensure proper data handling and query optimisation for the modified API endpoints.
* CI/CD Pipelines - Maintain and improve the existing CI/CD pipelines to ensure smooth and automated deployment to AWS environments. Ensure that code changes pass through the appropriate quality checks before deployment.
* Documentation - Ensure that any changes to the API are well-documented for future reference, including endpoint specifications and deployment processes.
* Must-Have Skills and Experience:
* Kotlin Development - Proven experience building and maintaining backend APIs using Kotlin. Understanding of Kotlin’s functional and object-oriented programming paradigms.
* API Development - Strong experience in designing, building, and maintaining RESTful APIs. Knowledge of API standards and best practices, especially in cloud environments.
* AWS Experience - Experience deploying and managing APIs and services on AWS. Proficiency with AWS services such as EC2, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, RDS,
* and Elastic Load Balancer (ELB).
* CI/CD Pipelines - Experience setting up, maintaining, and optimising CI/CD pipelines for automated builds, testing, and deployment using tools such
* as Jenkins, GitLab CI, or AWS CodePipeline.
* RDS Database Experience - Hands-on experience working with RDS (Relational Database Service), including query optimisation, schema design, and integration with backend systems.
Bonus Skills:
* Experience managing and configuring ELB for load balancing and familiarity with containerised environments using ECS is a plus.
* Familiarity with security best practices for AWS environments, including managing access control (IAM), secure API access, and data encryption.
* Experience with containerised applications (Docker, Kubernetes) especially in the context of backend APIs.
Information about Contract:
Please get in touch if you match the criteria and you are readily and immediately available to support on engineering@alike.org.uk (or via the relevant ad) with your CV and your day rate. We will contact you if we are interested in working together. We will then scope out the work with you to agree on a timeline. Please note we are a small team, and might not be able to respond to every request.