Mid-Level PHP Laravel Engineer

Laravel Engineer

Mid‑Level Laravel Engineer – Bryanston, Sandton, Johannesburg, South Africa – Development/Tech Ops – Full‑Time

About Sebenza:
At Sebenza, we are committed to driving excellence and empowering our people to make meaningful contributions that impact our business and customers. We believe in bridging skill gaps, creating opportunities for career growth, and fostering a culture where innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement thrive.

This role plays a key part in driving the technical direction of our platform, mentoring a team of talented developers, and working closely with product and design to ship high‑quality, scalable features. You will be an escalation point for the team, unblocking developers, reviewing code, and helping own the reliability of our platform.

• Build and ship production features in Laravel end‑to‑end.
• Review PRs from peers and junior engineers.
• Debug live production issues and escape when needed.
• Respond to alerts, triage, apply fixes, or hand off with context.
• RESTful API development and integration with other APIs and systems.

• Coder by nature — design and write major production systems end‑to‑end as primary author.
• Build robust, performant full‑stack features using Laravel (backend) and Vue.js / React / Next.js (frontend).
• Develop and maintain RESTful APIs and GraphQL endpoints consumed by web and mobile clients.
• Write high‑quality, well‑tested code with a focus on PHPUnit, Pest, and feature/integration testing.
• Optimize database queries (MySQL/MariaDB, Big Query), caching strategies (Redis), and background job processing (Laravel Queues, Horizon).
• Champion CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and zero‑downtime deployments.

• 3–5 years production Laravel (PHP) experience.
• PHPUnit / Pest testing.
• MySQL/MariaDB.
• Linux command line.
• AWS basics: EC2, RDS, S3, IAM.
• Git.

• Nginx.
• Redis.
• Big Query.
• Grafana/Prometheus.
• Any React/Next.js exposure.