Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Platform , contractor agreement hybrid; Riverlands office

• Type: Full-time, on a contractor agreement You'd work 9:00 to 17:30 SAST and get 20 days' paid leave plus South African public holidays, the same as our employed staff. We don't have a South African company, so this isn't PAYE. Nothing is deducted and you pay your own tax as a provisional taxpayer.
• Location: Cape Town hybrid (Riverlands office) Mainly remote, with office days in Riverlands for training and team working, so you need to live in or near Cape Town.
• Pay: R75,000 to R90,000 a month (cost to company, before tax), depending on experience
• Start: As soon as possible
• Eligibility: The right to work in South Africa (we can't offer visa sponsorship). Two references, one from your most recent employer. A SAPS police clearance certificate with digital fingerprints, apostilled, which we arrange and pay for. A criminal record doesn't automatically stop you being considered. Safeguarding and Prevent training, which we give you when you join.

You build with Claude Code every day and you've seen how fast it lets people ship. You're also the one who asks who can see the data, and what we'd show an auditor.

You'd be our first full-time engineer, owning the platform the rest of us build on, from Cape Town. You'd report to Jen, who leads our curriculum and our learning academy and was a data engineer before that.

We build our own software for almost everything we do, from the academy our learners use to our compliance, hiring and sales tools. Most of it is built with Claude by people who aren't engineers by background. That's how we move fast. It only works if someone makes it safe, and that's the job.

You'd own the foundation everything runs on, which means how people sign in and what they can see, the audit trail, testing, deployment, monitoring and backups, and the checks that catch a problem before it reaches a learner's record. Then you'd make it easy for the rest of us to build features on top of it securely, using the same AI tools you use.

The foundation comes first. After that, some of what we've built is good enough that other organisations want it, and you'd turn our academy and our compliance platform into products we can sell, running them for many customers at once and passing the security reviews those customers will ask for. You'd also build more of the systems we run our apprenticeships on, like tracking learners' progress and reviews.

• Building and running the shared foundation our apps sit on.
• Moving our existing apps onto it, starting with the ones that hold the most sensitive data.
• Reviewing what the team builds with Claude, and turning what you find into checks and Claude Code skills so the same mistake doesn't come back.
• Pairing with colleagues who are building their own tools and showing them how to do it safely.
• Getting the academy and our compliance platform ready for other organisations to buy, with each customer's data kept separate and answers ready for their security questions.
• Keeping our engineering ready for Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001, and leading the fix when something goes wrong.

We work in Next.js, Type Script and Postgres on Google Cloud, with Claude at the centre of how we build. Cape Town is one or two hours ahead of the UK, so you'd overlap with the team for most of the day. We're a startup, so there'll be other things to pick up as we grow, and we'd expect you to help where it's needed.

You'd set how we do engineering here and build the platform our products run on. Lots of companies are about to have people who aren't engineers shipping software with AI, and you'd be working out how to make that secure and auditable while it's still new.

We're a startup at an inflection point, and 2027 is when we scale. The platform is a big part of how we get there, and if you see a better way to build it, we'll actually do it.

You're a full-stack engineer who has built and run production web apps for several years, ideally in Type Script. You've owned auth, permissions, audit logs, CI and deployment, backups and incidents, and you care about getting them right. Claude Code or a tool like it is how you work now, and you could show us something you've built with it and the guardrails you put round it.

You like startups, and you're comfortable in a fast-moving environment where you work out the problem as well as the answer. You can explain a security risk to someone who isn't an engineer without making them feel stupid, and you'd enjoy helping them build.

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