PHP Engineer

We’re looking for a Staff PHP Engineer to provide technical leadership across Tillo’s platform, reliability, scalability, and engineering enablement capabilities. This role suits someone who combines deep hands‑on engineering expertise with strong architectural judgement, practical SRE experience, and real‑world experience using AI to improve engineering delivery, operational efficiency, and platform leverage.

You’ll work closely with Engineering Managers, Product, Security, Platform, QA, Data, and engineers across teams to help Tillo scale its systems, engineering practices, and operational maturity as we continue to grow globally. You’ll play a key role in evolving our platform so it can support increasing transaction volumes, more integrations, more markets, and higher customer expectations without operational complexity increasing at the same rate.

Help Tillo scale its platform reliability, engineering effectiveness, and AI‑enabled development practices across a growing global engineering organisation. You’ll identify scalability bottlenecks, improve operational resilience, strengthen engineering standards, and create leverage across teams through automation, architectural guidance, mentoring, and practical AI adoption.

This role can be based in either Cape Town or Hove. You’ll work as part of our global engineering organisation, collaborating with teams across the UK, USA, Australia, South Africa, and beyond. Our hybrid approach offers flexibility alongside regular in‑person collaboration within our offices.

• Lead highly ambiguous, business‑critical technical initiatives that help Tillo scale its platform, systems, and engineering practices
• Shape technical strategy across scalability, reliability, architecture, platform maturity, and engineering enablement
• Identify and address scalability constraints across applications, APIs, queues, integrations, infrastructure, and third‑party dependencies
• Drive improvements across observability, incident management, operational readiness, SLI/SLOs, deployment safety, and service ownership
• Conduct architecture and reliability reviews to identify operational risks, scaling bottlenecks, and opportunities for optimisation
• Partner with Engineering Managers and teams to improve engineering standards, reliability mindset, and technical decision‑making
• Reduce operational toil through automation, internal tooling, repeatable engineering patterns, and platform improvements
• Support and evolve engineering workflows across CI/CD, deployment safety, repository standards, testing approaches, and developer enablement
• Use AI practically to improve engineering workflows, code quality, documentation, operational support, developer tooling, and engineering efficiency
• Help define scalable AI‑enabled engineering practices across a large multi‑repository environment
• Improve repository consistency, engineering governance, and documentation standards to support AI‑assisted development workflows
• Work closely with Product, Platform, QA, Security, Data, Commercial, and Operations teams to solve cross‑functional technical problems
• Link engineering investment and technical decisions back to business impact, customer experience, operational resilience, and scalability goals
• Mentor engineers across teams through technical guidance, office hours, architectural discussions, and engineering coaching
• Communicate technical trade‑offs, risks, scalability concerns, and strategic recommendations clearly to technical and non‑technical stakeholders

• Significant experience as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Senior Platform Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, SRE, or equivalent senior IC role within a scaled software environment or high‑growth scale‑up
• Expert PHP/Laravel experience or deep PHP expertise across comparable backend environments
• Strong full‑stack engineering background with modern frontend framework experience such as Vue.js/Nuxt, React, or similar
• Strong understanding of scalable distributed systems, system trade‑offs, and architectural decision‑making
• Experience driving platform reliability, incident management, observability, operational…