Senior PHP Developer

LOCATION: Cape Town, South Africa

WORK MODEL: Hybrid (3 days office / 2 days remote)

SENIORITY: Senior

SALARY: R60,000 – R90,000 CTC per month (based on skill and experience)

About

Our client is a friendly, all-digital tax assistant that makes tax easy for millions of South Africans. They combine the expertise of several tax professionals into one guided experience, helping people file their own tax returns quickly, easily, and with confidence.

Company Highlights

• Founded in 2011 with seed funding from Google
• Fully integrated with SARS eFiling
• Has helped over 14 million South Africans to date
• Partnerships with Momentum, Sanlam, Old Mutual, PwC, Nedbank, Capitec, FNB, and Airbnb (among others)
• Driving profits for some of South Africa’s largest insurers
• Consistent ease-of-use rating above 9/10

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field (equivalent experience considered)
• Strong PHP proficiency — 5+ years of practical OOP experience (WordPress experience does not count)
• Strong MySQL / PostgreSQL proficiency — 5+ years of practical experience
• 3+ years of practical experience with a PHP MVC framework (Symfony preferred; Laravel acceptable)
• 3+ years of practical experience with Git for source control
• Comfortable working in a Unix-based OS (Ubuntu Linux or macOS)
• Creative problem solver with a collaborative, open-source mindset
• Self-directed and self-motivated, able to learn new technologies independently
• Fluent in English (written and verbal)

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, develop, and maintain internal and client-facing functionality across the full lifecycle, from inception through deployment
• Write clean, efficient, and reusable code, applying SOLID, DRY, and KISS principles
• Monitor, test, improve, and upgrade existing functionality
• Contribute ideas to improve the system and advance company goals
• Refactor legacy code into a new Symfony / ReactJS based system
• Help maintain and improve the AWS-based production environment
• Create and consume APIs (both REST and SOAP)

Projects You’ll Work On

• Upgrading into a multimodal, agentic AI tax assistant
• Migrating the PHP codebase into a RESTful Symfony API
• Migrating the front-end into a ReactJS single-page application
• Exposing the service as a public API (OpenAPI Spec)
• Using machine learning to serve customers faster

What We Offer

• Hardware of your choice (Apple MacBook or Dell XPS)
• Skillshare account and LLM subscription to support ongoing learning
• All software licences you need to do your best work
• Meaningful impact: build products that genuinely help people
• Autonomy to estimate, schedule, and own your projects
• Beautiful shared office in Cape Town with a mountain view
• Small-team, start-up culture — no big-corporate feel
• Hybrid working model: 3 days in-office, 2 days remote focus time