Senior Fullstack Developer

Stealth Startup; South Africa; Remote; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly

Job summary

Stealth Startup in South Africa seeks a Senior Full-Stack Developer to own end-to-end feature delivery from React TypeScript UIs to Python APIs and AWS/Azure integrations.

You will work with product and the founding team in a fast-moving, remote-friendly environment, taking ownership of frontend and backend services and shaping architectural direction.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software development, with senior/lead experience on a product team.
• Deep React and TypeScript expertise (5+ years), including Next.js App Router.
• Strong API design for web apps and external partners.
• Experience mentoring developers and leading technical discussions.
• Security mindset: authentication flows, OWASP, secrets management.

Responsibilities

• Lead features from idea to production: break down requirements with product manager, design API contracts, ship in increments.
• Set engineering standards: code review, testing, migrations, security and accessibility.
• Mentor developers through pairing, reviews, and knowledge sharing.
• Own production quality: monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis.
• Own frontend areas: listings, offers, negotiations, payments, KYC.

Skills

React

TypeScript

Next.js

Python

FastAPI

Azure

SQL

PostgreSQL

SQLAlchemy

Alembic

React Query

React Hook Form

Zod

Stripe

Stream Chat

Google Maps

CI/CD

Celery

Azure Service Bus

JWT

Tools

Tailwind CSS

Radix / Base UI

Docker

Pulumi

GitHub Actions

Alembic

Job description

Location: Johannesburg or Cape Town

Contractor: 6 months and then rolling

Level: Fullstack Developer 7 years+

Reports to: Head of Product

The opportunity

We are a new type of institutional real estate platform providing the infrastructure to invest in real estate on a global basis. We are hiring a Senior Full-Stack Developer to own feature delivery end-to-end; from React TypeScript UIs to Python APIs, data models, and AWS integrations. You will be working closely with product and the founding team in a fast-moving, remote-friendly environment.

What you will work on

You’ll own features end to end across our Next.js customer and operations portal and our FastAPI services on Azure. You’ll shape technical direction, raise the bar on quality, and help the team ship reliably.

What you'll do

Ownership and technical leadership

• Lead features from idea to production: break down requirements with product manager, write short design notes, agree API contracts, and ship in safe increments
• Make and document architecture decisions across frontend, backend and data, balancing delivery speed against long-term maintainability
• Set and uphold engineering standards: code review, testing, API design, migrations, security and accessibility
• Mentor other developers through pairing, reviews and knowledge sharing
• Own production quality for your areas: monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis and follow-up fixes

Frontend

• Build customer journeys in Next.js: property search and detail, listing creation, buy and sell flows, offers and negotiation, conveyancing, KYC onboarding and portfolio management
• Evolve the internal operations console (accounts, permissions, ledger, referrals, marketing leads) in the same app
• Shape the component system on Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui (Radix / Base UI): reusable patterns, design tokens, accessibility (WCAG) and responsive layouts
• Define data-fetching and caching patterns with TanStack React Query, and form patterns with React Hook Form and Zod
• Own complex integrations: Stripe payments, Stream chat, Google Maps, web push, and passkeys / two-factor sign-in
• Drive frontend performance (Core Web Vitals, bundle size, rendering strategy across server and client components)
• Design and build FastAPI services: the portal API and the referral and partner-programme service
• Own domain areas such as listings, offers and negotiation, payments, conveyancing, KYC, notifications and commissions
• Model data with SQLAlchemy and plan zero-downtime schema changes with Alembic.
• Design event-driven and background processing with Azure Service Bus and Celery, with idempotency and ordering in mind
• Build on Azure services: Blob Storage, Service Bus, Table Storage, Communication Services (email/SMS), Key Vault and managed identities
• Harden the platform: authentication and authorisation, rate limiting, PII-safe logging, and performance of search and offer endpoints

Frontend

• Stripe, Stream Chat, Amplitude
• Vitest, Testing Library, Playwright

Backend and platform

• Python 3.11+, FastAPI, Pydantic v2, SQLAlchemy 2.x, Alembic
• JWT (RS256), WebAuthn passkeys, OpenAPI-documented REST APIs
• Node.js backend-for-frontend services (Express)
• Docker, Pulumi (infrastructure as code), GitHub Actions CI/CD
• pytest (4,600+ tests)

What we're looking for

• 7+ years of professional software development, at least 2 of them in a senior or lead role on a product team
• Deep React and TypeScript experience (5+ years), including production Next.js App Router work (server/client components, routing, caching, rendering strategy)
• Strong product-UI engineering: complex forms, data tables, multi-step flows, accessibility, and turning Figma designs into maintainable component systems
• Expert use of React Query or similar: cache design, invalidation, optimistic updates and keeping data fresh
• 5+ years building production APIs in FastAPI, Django REST or similar; strong SQL and PostgreSQL, including query tuning, indexing and safe migrations on live data
• Proven API design for web apps and external partners: versioning, backwards compatibility, error contracts and documentation
• Hands-on cloud experience, preferably Azure (storage, messaging, identity, containers) or equivalent on AWS / GCP; comfortable with event-driven designs and their failure modes (retries, duplicates, dead-lettering)
• A security mindset: authentication flows, OWASP top 10, secrets management and handling personal and financial data
• Testing as a habit across unit, integration and end-to-end, and the judgement to know what is worth testing
• Experience mentoring developers and leading technical discussions and reviews
• Clear written English; effective async with distributed teams; able to explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders

Nice to have

• Real estate, PropTech, or marketplace / two-sided platform experience
• Real estate or marketplace UX (search filters, maps, trust and compliance messaging)
• Maps (Google Maps) or internationalisation (react-intl) experience
• Stripe Elements or hosted checkout integration on the frontend; Stripe webhooks, idempotent payment handling, or subscription flows on the backend
• LLM integration (Bedrock, OpenAI), LangChain, or document OCR (Textract) in production