Full Stack Engineer

BestSafari.africa helps travellers find the right safari lodge for them, instead of the most heavily marketed one. A short quiz captures what matters to a traveller (priorities, budget, constraints, preferred region), and our scoring engine ranks a curated set of lodges across Africa to produce a personalised shortlist.

The product is live in production with real users. You'll be joining a small, dynamic, creative and motivated team that includes the founders. We are an early-stage start-up, with a strong team and patented technology, and the engineering decisions made over the next year will shape what the company becomes.

The role

We are hiring a full-stack engineer to take responsibility for the BestSafari.africa platform, end to end, and to help the team decide how, why and what to build next.

This is a development role with a seat at the table. You will be involved in business decisions. You will have responsibility of a live product, and agency to shape how it is built, and a direct line to the people deciding where the company goes. If you want to join the founding team and assist in making this a successful company and product, this is that job.

You inherit a working, documented system and a thorough handover.

What you'll do

• Build and ship product. Own features across the Django API and the Next.js frontend, from the quiz and results flow to region pages and the blog.

• Own the scoring and data. Maintain the recommendation engine and run lodge data refreshes, keeping results trustworthy and tested.

• Run the platform. Deploys, environments (QA, staging, production), monitoring, incident response and cost, on AWS and Vercel.

• Keep quality high. Reviews, tests, CI, and keeping the codebase and docs in a state the next person can pick up.

• Work with the business. Turn what the team needs (content, SEO, bookings, partner integrations) into a plan and then into working software.

• Shape priorities. Say what you think we should and should not build, and why.

What we're looking for

Must have

• Several years (3-5+) of shipping production software, comfortable across backend and frontend.

• Strong Python and Django (REST APIs, Postgres, background jobs), and TypeScript with React.

• Good judgement about trade-offs: you can make a call with incomplete information and explain it to a non-technical teammate.

• Comfort owning a system in production, including when something breaks.

• Clear written communication. Enthusiastic and focused. Competent but not pedantic.

Nice to have

• Next.js App Router experience.

• AWS and Docker, CI/CD, Celery and Redis.

• SEO, analytics or content-driven product experience.

Mindset

You like ownership, you ask "why" before "how", and you are proactive and creative, take initiative, rather than waiting for a developer spec.

Safari or travel experience is welcome but not required.

The stack

Layer

Technology

Backend

Python 3.13, Django, Django REST Framework, Postgres, Celery + Redis

Frontend

Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, React, Tailwind CSS

Infrastructure

AWS (EC2, RDS, ElastiCache, CloudWatch), Docker, Vercel

Tooling

GitHub Actions CI, pytest, Vitest, Linear, PostHog

The codebase has agent guides, a product-context docs folder and a test suite that validates the scoring engine against its original reference implementation.

The team and how we work

You will work day to day with the broader team. Your line manager is the Managing Director. There are no hand-offs over a wall - and product, content and engineering sit in the same conversations.

We work in small, reviewed pull requests, keep tickets in Linear, and ship to production often. We need you to be engaging, vested, right about the things that matter and quick about the rest.

Practicalities

• Location: Remote, with the ability to meet in Cape Town every 1-2 weeks or so.

• Hardware and software will be provided.

• Employment: Full-time, permanent

• Start date: 11 November 2026 or sooner