Building Romania's pharmacy staffing marketplace — from mobile app to payment platform
How Softescu designed and built Locum's end-to-end platform connecting pharmacies with freelance pharmacists — including a cross-platform mobile app, digital contract signing, automated invoice generation, and integrated payment processing.
Technologies: Angular, Ionic, TypeScript, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, SQL Server, IronPDF, Azure App Services
The Challenge
Locum set out to digitise the fragmented short-term pharmacist staffing market in Romania, where pharmacies struggled to fill shift vacancies quickly and qualified pharmacists had no structured way to find freelance work. The platform needed to serve two distinct user groups — pharmacies posting jobs and pharmacists applying for them — while handling the full operational complexity of a staffing marketplace: contracts, compliance documentation, KYC verification, and financial settlement between parties.
Beyond matching, the platform required robust back-office capabilities: generating legally compliant PDF invoices and contracts at scale, processing payments between pharmacies and pharmacists, and providing an admin dashboard for Locum's operations team to manage the entire workflow. The mobile experience was critical — pharmacists needed to discover, apply for, and manage assignments directly from their phones.
Our Solution
Softescu built the complete platform over a multi-year engagement spanning two integrated components. The ASP.NET Core backend provides the core marketplace logic: job posting and application workflows, pharmacist-pharmacy matching, KYC document verification, and a payment processing layer that handles fund disbursement between pharmacies and pharmacists. A high-volume PDF generation system produces legally compliant invoices and contracts automatically — with structured templates covering fiscal codes, VAT calculations, and contract annexes.
The cross-platform mobile app, built with Angular and Ionic for iOS and Android, gives pharmacists full access to the marketplace: browsing job listings, submitting applications, managing their profile and documents, signing contracts with electronic signature, and tracking their earnings. Digital onboarding was streamlined through e-signature integration and automated contract generation, reducing the manual paperwork that had previously made short-term pharmacy staffing impractical. Promotional and discount code functionality was added to support Locum's growth and acquisition campaigns.