Middle Backend Developer (Laravel / PHP)

Middle Backend Developer (Laravel / PHP)

Project:

Admin platform for managing insurance products offered together with major telecom providers in South Africa — policies, claims, payments (debit orders), customer communications (SMS/email), reporting, and third-party integrations.

You'll build software used by thousands of customers across the South African insurance market. It's a large modular Laravel application with multiple business domains and mature legacy areas that require careful, incremental improvement.

What you'll do

• Build and maintain the backend of a large modular Laravel application (15+ business modules)

• Maintain and improve existing functionality across multiple business domains

• Investigate production issues and implement sustainable fixes

• Refactor existing code following service-oriented architecture and separation of concerns

• Investigate and optimize slow SQL queries, reporting pipelines, and batch-processing jobs

• Refactor and optimize console commands and scheduled jobs (payment reminders, debit-order cycles, claim SLA checks)

• Generate operational and financial reports in PDF, Excel, and Word formats

• Work with background queues (beanstalkd + Supervisor) for async processing

• Support integrations: SOAP web services, SMS gateways, PGP/GPG file encryption

• Participate in code review and work through a ticket-based flow (Jira, OM-XXX tickets) with PRs

Must-have

• PHP 8+

• Laravel

• SQL

• Git

• REST APIs

• Queues

• English at a confident reading/writing level (tickets and PR discussions are in English)

• ~2–4 years of commercial PHP/Laravel experience

Nice-to-have

• Modular Laravel architecture nwidart/laravel-modules or similar)

• Spatie ecosystem (laravel-data, laravel-permission, medialibrary)

• Queues on beanstalkd / Supervisor, Redis

• SOAP integrations, SMS gateway experience

• PGP/GPG and handling sensitive financial/insurance data

• Fintech / insurance / telecom domain background

• Pest / PHPUnit, Laravel Pint

• Basic frontend: Blade, Bootstrap 5, Vite

Soft skills

• Comfortable working in a mature legacy codebase

• Willingness to gradually improve existing code instead of rewriting everything

• Ownership of assigned features through deployment

• Able to break larger tasks into steps and carry them through to release with light guidance

• Communicative — a lot of the work happens in PR discussions