Senior PHP Developer

Senior PHP Developer – Full-Stack

Full-Time · South Africa Remote / EST Hours · Higher Education SaaS

Skills:

PHP / LaravelBootstrapMySQLLegacy CodebasesSAML / SSODigitalOcean / AWS

The role:

We're hiring a Senior PHP Developer to take real ownership across a dual remit - hands-on product development and direct customer-facing technical support. You'll work closely alongside a CTO on the engineering side, and with a customer success team to scope and ship features that matter to real users every day.

What you'll do:

• Lead technical onboarding calls with customers and their IT teams - SSO (SAML 2.0), course data mapping, EAB exports, Salesforce integrations, and Microsoft Teams setup
• Act as the senior technical escalation point for a non-technical customer success team
• Conduct training sessions with university administrators and campus IT staff
• Own features end-to-end - scoping with stakeholders through to delivery, testing, and iteration
• Build and maintain across the full stack: PHP/Laravel backend and Bootstrap frontend
• Lead ongoing refactoring and modernisation of a legacy PHP codebase
• Produce documentation and instructional materials for customers and internal use
• Respond to data security audits and support prospective customer onboarding

What we're looking for:

• Deep, production-grade PHP and Laravel experience - modern Laravel layered over legacy codebases
• Full-stack comfort: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Bootstrap front-to-back
• Strong MySQL skills - schema design, querying, and optimisation
• Proven experience maintaining and modernising legacy code without disrupting live systems
• Working knowledge of SAML 2.0 / SSO; third-party integrations (EAB, Salesforce) a plus
• Familiarity with DigitalOcean and/or AWS environments
• Clear, confident communication - you'll be on calls with university administrators regularly
• Ownership mindset - you take a feature from brief to production and stand behind it
• Comfortable with sprint-based workflows and scoping alongside non-technical stakeholders

Good to know:

• No direct reports - seniority here means ownership and autonomy, not people management
• Small, lean team - your work ships and you'll see its impact immediately
• South Africa Remote / EST Hours