Staff PHP Engineer

Who we’re looking for

We’re looking for a Staff PHP Engineer to provide technical leadership across Tillo’s platform, reliability, scalability, and engineering enablement capabilities. This role suits someone who combines deep hands‑on engineering expertise with strong architectural judgement, practical SRE experience, and real‑world experience using AI to improve engineering delivery, operational efficiency, and platform leverage.

You’ll work closely with Engineering Managers, Product, Security, Platform, QA, Data, and engineers across teams to help Tillo scale its systems, engineering practices, and operational maturity as we continue to grow globally. You’ll play a key role in evolving our platform so it can support increasing transaction volumes, more integrations, more markets, and higher customer expectations without operational complexity increasing at the same rate.

The challenge

Help Tillo scale its platform reliability, engineering effectiveness, and AI‑enabled development practices across a growing global engineering organisation. You’ll identify scalability bottlenecks, improve operational resilience, strengthen engineering standards, and create leverage across teams through automation, architectural guidance, mentoring, and practical AI adoption.

Where you’ll work

This role can be based in either Cape Town or Hove. You’ll work as part of our global engineering organisation, collaborating with teams across the UK, USA, Australia, South Africa, and beyond. Our hybrid approach offers flexibility alongside regular in‑person collaboration within our offices.

Day to day this role will

• Lead highly ambiguous, business‑critical technical initiatives that help Tillo scale its platform, systems, and engineering practices.
• Shape technical strategy across scalability, reliability, architecture, platform maturity, and engineering enablement.
• Identify and address scalability constraints across applications, APIs, queues, integrations, infrastructure, and third‑party dependencies.
• Drive improvements across observability, incident management, operational readiness, SLIs/SLOs, deployment safety, and service ownership.
• Conduct architecture and reliability reviews to identify operational risks, scaling bottlenecks, and opportunities for optimisation.
• Partner with Engineering Managers and teams to improve engineering standards, reliability mindset, and technical decision‑making.
• Reduce operational toil through automation, internal tooling, repeatable engineering patterns, and platform improvements.
• Support and evolve engineering workflows across CI/CD, deployment safety, repository standards, testing approaches, and developer enablement.
• Use AI practically to improve engineering workflows, code quality, documentation, operational support, developer tooling, and engineering efficiency.
• Help define scalable AI‑enabled engineering practices across a large multi‑repository environment.
• Improve repository consistency, engineering governance, and documentation standards to support AI‑assisted development workflows.
• Work closely with Product, Platform, QA, Security, Data, Commercial, and Operations teams to solve cross‑functional technical problems.
• Link engineering investment and technical decisions back to business impact, customer experience, operational resilience, and scalability goals.
• Mentor engineers across teams through technical guidance, office hours, architectural discussions, and engineering coaching.
• Communicate technical trade‑offs, risks, scalability concerns, and strategic recommendations clearly to technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

What we’re looking for

• Significant experience as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Senior Platform Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, SRE, or equivalent senior IC role within 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.
• Strong experience with CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, deployment strategies, infrastructure patterns, and engineering tooling.
• Demonstrated experience influencing engineering organisations without direct authority.
• Experience identifying and resolving scalability constraints across applications, infrastructure, APIs, queues, data stores, or integrations.
• Practical experience using AI to improve engineering workflows, automation, developer tooling, operational efficiency, or engineering enablement.
• Strong systems thinking with the ability to balance technical quality, delivery speed, reliability, maintainability, security, and business impact.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable operating autonomously in highly ambiguous environments.
• Experience supporting secure engineering practices aligned with modern application security and ISO 27001 expectations.

Helpful experience

• Experience with AWS.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, or similar container orchestration platforms.
• Experience implementing or evolving SRE practices at scale.
• Experience improving repository standards, engineering governance, or developer enablement tooling.
• Experience with AI coding assistants, AI‑enabled operational tooling, or internal AI platform initiatives.
• Experience within high‑growth scale‑ups or transactional platform environments.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers or future technical leaders.
• Fintech, payments, rewards, incentives, or regulated platform experience is beneficial but not required.

Benefits

We offer all our employees trust and empower our team to work with flexibility and autonomy. We’re a close‑knit team and love working collaboratively, with our hybrid model, our team can come together at our fantastic offices, but also focus in their own space. The Tillo team are a motivated bunch and we all work hard to push Tillo forwards, always innovating. We completely understand the importance of work/life balance and offer a supportive and collaborative working environment with the following 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.
• Anniversary gifts.
• Monthly breakfasts, drinks, snacks and events.
• Team Learning & Development budget.

About Tillo

Tillo makes gift cards, rewards, and incentives simple, efficient, and profitable. Operating in over 37 markets and 25 currencies, Tillo processes billions in gift card transactions through a single, plug‑and‑go API, powering rewards and incentives for the world’s leading businesses.

Backed by Tenzing, Tillo is setting the global standard for digital gift card infrastructure.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statement

We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued and respected. We welcome applications from individuals of all backgrounds, regardless of age, disability, gender identity, marital status, race, ethnicity, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know, and we will be happy to accommodate your needs.

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