Full Stack Developer (PHP / React / React Native)

About

About Alumly Pty Ltd Alumly Pty Ltd (trading as Alumable) is a venture-backed early-stage Australian software company building the country's first "Earn While You Learn" micro-internship platform, connecting tertiary students with paid professional gigs. We run a Laravel/MySQL platform and native iOS and Android apps, we move money between host companies and student workers, and we build product features on Anthropic's Claude models.

The role

We are seeking a senior Full Stack Developer to own Alumly's platform end-to-end - backend, mobile and AI features. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role in a small team, with limited supervision and tight delivery commitments. Two things make this role unusual, and both are hard requirements. First, a substantial part of our engineering is transactional and financial systems work - payments, payouts and reconciliation that must be correct, auditable and secure. Second, this is an AI-first engineering team: we build customer-facing features on Claude and we work natively inside agentic coding tooling. We are not looking for someone who has used ChatGPT - we need a developer who has shipped and maintained LLM-backed features in production.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate Alumly's payment, payout, billing and reconciliation systems in PHP (Laravel), including third-party payment provider integrations
• Ensure secure handling of sensitive financial and personal data - encryption at rest and in transit, access control, defensible audit trails
• Design, implement and optimise MySQL schemas and complex queries for performance at scale
• Design and maintain a microservices architecture, applying Domain Driven Design and modular boundaries
• Implement asynchronous processing with message queues (RabbitMQ) and caching (Redis) for throughput and fault tolerance under load
• Develop and maintain Alumly's iOS and Android applications in React Native, and own the full release cycle through App Store Connect and Google Play - build provisioning, certificates, TestFlight distribution and store policy compliance
• Design, build and ship customer-facing AI features on Anthropic Claude models - system prompt and context design, tool use, structured outputs and streaming
• Integrate LLM capability into the Laravel backend and the React Native apps, including fallback handling and token-cost control
• Build internal admin and operations interfaces in React
• Design and integrate RESTful APIs across web and mobile clients
• Maintain high automated test coverage using PHPUnit, and participate in code review - including review discipline for AI-generated code
• Act as production owner: monitoring, incident response, diagnosis and resolution of live issues
• Build automated reporting for finance and regulatory/tax obligations

Core engineering

• At least 5 years of relevant work experience in commercial backend or full stack software development
• Expert-level PHP, with production experience in Laravel and/or Symfony on modern PHP (8.x)
• Demonstrated commercial experience building payment, billing, payout or comparable financial transaction systems - applications without this will not be progressed
• Demonstrated experience operating high-load / high-availability production systems and diagnosing performance problems under real traffic
• Demonstrated experience designing microservices architectures, including decomposition from a monolith, applying Domain Driven Design or equivalent
• Hands-on production experience with message brokers (RabbitMQ or equivalent) and caching (Redis or equivalent)
• Strong MySQL and/or PostgreSQL schema design and query optimisation
• Demonstrated experience implementing secure handling of payment or other sensitive personal data (encryption, tokenisation, PCI-aware practice)
• Commercial experience in ReactJS
• Rigorous automated testing practice including PHPUnit and demonstrably high code coverage
• Proficiency with Git and Docker
• Experience as a production / site-responsible engineer, including on-call or 24/7 support responsibility
• Demonstrated delivery in an Agile environment against tight commitments with minimal supervision

Mobile

• Demonstrated commercial experience building and maintaining production mobile applications in React Native
• Demonstrated experience releasing and maintaining apps on both the Apple App Store and Google Play, including provisioning, certificates, TestFlight and store policy compliance

AI engineering

• Demonstrated production experience building on Anthropic Claude models - features shipped to real users and maintained in production, not prototypes or personal projects
• Practical working knowledge of system prompt and context design, tool use / function calling, and structured outputs
• Experience integrating LLM capability into a production backend and mobile client, including fallback handling and token-cost control
• Demonstrated fluency with agentic AI development tooling (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor) as daily working practice, including review discipline for AI-generated code
• Ability to articulate the failure modes of LLM-backed features - hallucination, prompt injection, non-determinism - and the engineering controls used to manage them

Other

• Full, unrestricted and ongoing Australian work rights, and currently based in Melbourne

Skills and experience desirable

• Integrating third-party payment providers (PayPal, Stripe or equivalent) at scale
• Antifraud, risk or compliance systems
• Automated regulatory or tax reporting
• Native iOS (Swift) or Android (Kotlin) development
• AWS Bedrock, model guardrails and cost governance
• Multi-step agent orchestration or MCP-based tool integrations
• AWS cloud environments and CI/CD pipelines
• Planning work and allocating tasks across a small engineering team
• Python

Remuneration

Competitive annual salary plus superannuation, commensurate with experience.

Pay

Pay: From $110,000.00 per year

Work Location

Work Location: In person