Staff PHP Engineer

Tillo Limited

Job Overview

Location

Cape Town Office

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Lead highly ambiguous, business-critical technical initiatives to scale Tillo’s platform reliability, engineering practices, and operational maturity across a global engineering organisation.
• Shape technical strategy across scalability, architecture, platform maturity, and engineering enablement, ensuring systems can support increasing transaction volumes, integrations, markets, and customer expectations without proportional operational complexity.
• Identify and resolve scalability bottlenecks across applications, APIs, queues, infrastructure, third-party dependencies, and data stores to maintain high-performance and low-latency systems.
• Drive improvements in observability, incident management, operational readiness, SLIs/SLOs, deployment safety, and service ownership to enhance platform resilience.
• Conduct architecture and reliability reviews to uncover operational risks, scaling constraints, and opportunities for optimisation across the entire tech stack.
• Partner with Engineering Managers, Product, Security, Platform, QA, Data, and Commercial teams to align technical decisions with business impact, customer experience, and scalability goals.
• Reduce operational toil through automation, internal tooling, repeatable engineering patterns, and platform-level improvements that enable faster, safer delivery.
• Support and evolve engineering workflows including CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, repository standards, testing approaches, and developer enablement tooling.
• Use AI practically to improve code quality, documentation, operational support, developer tooling, and engineering efficiency across a large multi-repository environment.
• Define scalable AI-enabled engineering practices, including integration of AI coding assistants and AI-powered operational tooling into daily workflows.
• Improve repository consistency, engineering governance, and documentation standards to enable reliable AI-assisted development and maintainability at scale.
• Mentor engineers across teams through technical guidance, office hours, architectural discussions, and coaching to build internal capability and leadership.
• Communicate complex technical trade-offs, risks, and strategic recommendations clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Influence engineering culture and standards without direct authority, fostering a reliability mindset, strong engineering practices, and cross-team collaboration.
• Link all engineering investments directly to measurable business outcomes including operational resilience, customer experience, and scalability.
• Work in a hybrid model with regular in-person collaboration at Cape Town or Hove offices while collaborating globally with teams across the UK, USA, Australia, South Africa, and beyond.
• Contribute to secure engineering practices aligned with modern application security standards and ISO 27001 expectations.
• Balance technical quality, delivery speed, reliability, maintainability, security, and business impact in all architectural and operational decisions.
• Operate autonomously in ambiguous environments with high ownership over platform-wide technical outcomes.

🎯 Requirements

• Significant experience as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Senior Platform Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, SRE, or equivalent senior IC role in 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 readiness, and automation initiatives
• Demonstrated experience influencing engineering organisations without direct authority

🏖️ Benefits

• 21 days holiday per annum (plus an additional day for your birthday)
• Retirement Fund (5%)
• Health insurance contribution
• Employee Incentive Scheme
• Hybrid Working
• Top spec equipment including laptop, mouse, keyboard, monitor

Skills & Technologies

JavaScript

PHP

React

Vue.js

Senior

Hybrid

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Tillo Limited

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About Tillo Limited

Tillo is a UK-based fintech that operates a digital gift-card and reward platform connecting brands with consumers and employees. Through APIs and integrations, the company enables businesses to purchase, distribute and manage digital gift cards and incentives from over 2,000 global retailers in real time, supporting customer acquisition, loyalty and employee recognition programmes. Tillo handles compliance, currency conversion and delivery, allowing clients to embed rewards into their apps or workflows without managing inventory. Founded in 2016, it serves enterprises, agencies and fintechs worldwide.

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