Senior Full-Stack PHP Developer
Contract | Remote (South Africa) | Full-Time Hours
About the Role
We're looking for a Senior Full-Stack PHP Developer to join one of our clients in a fast-moving applications team during an exciting period of platform growth and delivery. You'll work across a customer-facing web platform and its APIs, building new features, integrating third-party services, and surfacing new data and reporting experiences for end users.
This is a full-stack role and you'll be embedded directly into our client's team, joining daily standups, working within established processes and tooling, and picking up work across the backlog, from backend PHP/Symfony development through to React/TypeScript UI work. We're looking for experienced professionals who can get up to speed quickly and start delivering with minimal ramp-up time.
What You'll Be Working On
- Building and improving customer-facing features across a large, established PHP/Symfony web application backed by MySQL
- Developing new UI components and views in React/TypeScript
- Exposing new data and reporting through portal pages, reporting views, and API layers
- Integrating third-party services via their APIs and SDKs, and maintaining clean abstraction layers
- Enhancing and extending the existing PHP API layer to support new platform features
- Full-stack delivery across backend and frontend, picking up whatever the backlog needs
The Tech Stack
Backend
- PHP with Symfony, clean code architecture, not just framework familiarity
- Doctrine ORM
- MySQL (production and read replicas)
- AWS-hosted, served via Apache
Frontend
- React built in TypeScript
- JavaScript and CSS; some legacy Vue
Testing
- PHPUnit for unit testing
- Playwright for UI/E2E testing
What We're Looking For
- Strong commercial PHP experience, ideally with Symfony or a comparable modern PHP framework, with a solid grasp of clean API design and architecture
- Solid SQL skills: writing and optimising queries against large datasets, comfortable working with an ORM. MySQL experience is a plus; strong Postgres experience is also acceptable
- Proven experience building and consuming REST APIs, including third-party integrations
- Comfortable working on AWS-hosted applications
- Frontend competence in TypeScript/JavaScript sufficient to contribute across the full stack
- Strong engineering discipline, version control, unit testing, code review and clear written communication for a remote embedded team
- Secure coding awareness: you should write to a standard that passes automated static analysis and secrets scanning as part of the CI/CD pipeline
Nice to Have
- React experience - strongly valued; without it, the focus would be on PHP/Symfony, API, and legacy portal work
- React Native awareness - some work feeds from a driver-facing mobile app
- Exposure to telematics, IoT, or high-volume data platforms
- Experience modernising or re-platforming legacy applications
- Familiarity with agentic coding tools such as Cursor or Claude Code
- Docker - working familiarity expected at senior level
- Python - not needed for this engagement but a longer-term plus
Ways of Working
This is a fully remote engagement but requires guaranteed overlap with UK business hours for daily standups and team collaboration. You'll be embedded directly in the team, this is not a hand-off or black-box delivery model. We value pragmatic, delivery-focused engineers who are comfortable in large established codebases and focused on shipping.
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