Senior Full-Stack PHP Developer

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.