Senior PHP/Laravel Developer with Infrastructure & DevOps Experience

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior PHP/Laravel Developer with Infrastructure & DevOps Experience based in South Africa. We are seeking an experienced technical professional who combines strong software engineering expertise with hands-on infrastructure and DevOps capabilities. In this role, you will build, maintain, and modernize business-critical, data-driven applications while ensuring the reliability of the systems that support them. You will spend approximately 70% of your time on software development and application support, with the remaining 30% dedicated to infrastructure administration and DevOps. You will work across the full application lifecycle, from architecture and development to deployment, monitoring, and incident resolution. Your contributions will help improve system performance, security, maintainability, and operational resilience. This opportunity is ideal for a senior developer who enjoys solving complex technical challenges, taking ownership of production systems, and continuously improving both applications and infrastructure in a remote working environment.

Application Development and Maintenance: Design, develop, test, deploy, and maintain business-critical applications using PHP, Laravel, Filament, and PostgreSQL. Modernize legacy systems, reduce technical debt, and improve application performance, reliability, and maintainability. Architecture and Integrations: Design and maintain application architecture, APIs, integrations, and data exchanges with internal systems, ensuring secure, reliable, and efficient data flows. Code Quality and Testing: Maintain automated testing, static analysis, code-quality checks, and code-review practices. Use tools such as Pest, PHPStan, Laravel Pint, and related technologies to uphold high engineering standards. CI/CD and Deployment Automation: Support and improve continuous integration and delivery pipelines using Jenkins, Git, and Gitea, streamlining releases and reducing manual operational effort. Technical Leadership: Conduct code reviews, provide technical guidance, share knowledge, and support other developers in solving complex engineering challenges. Application Incident Management: Lead application-level incident response, troubleshoot production issues, perform root-cause analysis, and implement corrective and preventive measures. Infrastructure and Systems Administration: Administer a high-availability Proxmox cluster and manage related technologies, including Ceph/CephFS, ZFS, Linux systems, and containerized services. Platform Operations: Maintain and support essential services, including PostgreSQL, Jenkins, Gitea, web servers, Icinga, Grafana, and Loki, ensuring availability and operational stability. Security, Backup, and Recovery: Support access management, system patching, security controls, backup processes, recovery procedures, and capacity planning to protect infrastructure and business continuity. Monitoring and Continuous Improvement: Respond to infrastructure incidents, improve monitoring and logging, automate repetitive tasks, optimize deployment processes, and contribute to service restoration and root-cause investigations. Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Maintain clear technical documentation covering system architecture, configurations, operational procedures, recovery plans, and runbooks. Requirements Professional Experience: At least 8 years of professional experience in software development and related ICT domains, with a proven track record as a senior developer, technical lead, or equivalent technical specialist. PHP and Laravel Expertise: Strong hands-on experience developing and maintaining production applications using PHP and modern frameworks, ideally Laravel. Familiarity with PHP 8.4, Laravel 12, and Filament 5 is advantageous. Application Architecture and Databases: Strong understanding of application architecture, API design, system integrations, and relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL. Experience supporting business-critical, data-driven applications is essential. Software Quality and Security: Solid knowledge of secure coding practices, automated testing, static analysis, code reviews, and software quality standards. Experience with Pest, PHPUnit, PHPStan, and Laravel Pint is beneficial. CI/CD and Version Control: Practical experience with Git-based development workflows, Jenkins, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and deployment automation. Infrastructure and DevOps: Hands-on systems administration experience covering Linux, virtualization, containers, storage, monitoring, backups, security, and production infrastructure support. High-Availability Systems: Experience managing complex production environments, troubleshooting incidents, conducting root-cause analysis, and implementing reliable recovery and prevention strategies. Preferred Infrastructure Technologies: Experience with Proxmox, Ceph/CephFS, ZFS, Icinga, Grafana, Loki, and OVH-hosted infrastructure is strongly preferred. Familiarity with VMware, KVM, Prometheus, or comparable technologies is also valuable. Technical Documentation: Ability to produce clear, structured documentation and communicate technical knowledge effectively across teams. Communication and Collaboration: Ability to work independently, take ownership of technical decisions, and collaborate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders. Professional proficiency in English is required. Education: A degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience. Domain Knowledge: Experience with master data management, product information systems, supply chain platforms, or procurement systems is an additional advantage. Technology Environment: PHP 8.4, Laravel 12, Filament 5, PostgreSQL 15, Composer, Git, Gitea, Jenkins, PHPStan, Pest, Laravel Pint, Bruno, Sphinx, Doxygen, Proxmox HA, Ceph/CephFS, ZFS, Linux, containers, Icinga, Grafana, Loki, and OVH-hosted infrastructure. Application Note: Candidates should ensure their professional profile is complete and up to date and be prepared to provide concise, concrete examples of production work demonstrating both Laravel development and infrastructure administration experience. Relevant examples may include applications built or maintained, architecture decisions, testing and code-quality improvements, infrastructure and storage administration, monitoring and logging implementations, production incidents and their resolution, and backup or recovery procedures. Examples should describe your specific contribution, the production context or scale, and key technical decisions, rather than tutorials, personal experiments, or coursework. Benefits Fully Remote Work: Work remotely, with the opportunity to collaborate with distributed teams on real-world software projects. Technical Ownership: Take responsibility for business-critical applications and the infrastructure that supports them, with opportunities to influence architecture, engineering standards, and operational practices. Broad Technical Scope: Work across application development, databases, CI/CD, infrastructure, monitoring, security, and production reliability. Professional Growth: Expand your expertise across modern PHP and Laravel development, DevOps, high-availability systems, automation, and production operations. Collaborative Environment: Share knowledge with other technical professionals and contribute to improving development practices and system reliability. Flexible Remote Opportunities: Benefit from a remote-first working arrangement designed to support collaboration across distributed teams. Salary and Additional Benefits: Compensation, healthcare coverage, equipment provisions, paid leave, and other employment benefits have not been specified in the available job description and should be confirmed during the hiring process.