Senior Full Stack Developer – Johannesburg at Datafin Recruitment

ENVIRONMENT:

• A cutting-edge AgriTech is seeking an experienced Senior Full Stack Developer to drive the end-to-end development of their core AgriTech SaaS platform.  In this role, you will bridge the gap between user-facing interfaces and backend infrastructure, taking full ownership of feature delivery from database design to UI implementation. 
• They value pragmatic, sharp problem solvers who enjoy building scalable systems that bring tangible value to the agricultural sector.  Beyond hands-on development, you will help lead architectural decisions, optimise cross-layer performance, and foster technical excellence across the engineering team.

DUTIES:

• Full-Stack Feature Ownership: Design, build, and maintain end-to-end applications across the full lifecycle, connecting Angular/Flutter frontends with Ruby on Rails backend APIs using GraphQL (main stack)
• Architecture & Performance: Lead architectural design for scalable frontend and backend systems, ensuring low latency, clean code separation, and efficient network communications.
• Data Strategy & Infrastructure: Manage full-lifecycle deployments on AWS and Heroku. Optimize relational databases (PostgreSQL), design efficient schemas, and research advanced storage concepts (e.g. hashing, sharding) and distributed ETL processing.
• UI/UX & Product Collaboration: Partner closely with UI/UX designers and product owners to translate complex user workflows into responsive, intuitive web and desktop interfaces (utilising Tailwind CSS).
• Technical Leadership & Culture: Conduct deep-dive R&D, maintain high engineering standards through code reviews and continuous CI/CD improvement, and mentor team members via workshops and collaborative technical discussions.

REQUIREMENTS:

Formal Qualifications

• Preferred: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or Information Systems (or equivalent practical experience).

Knowledge, Skills & Experience

• They require that you have a passion for working in/learning the below, and proficiency is beneficial.

Experience &Technical Proficiency

• Seniority: 5+ years of software engineering experience delivering full-stack, production-grade applications.
• Frontend: Strong experience building production webapps with a modern component framework such as Angular, React, or Vue, using TypeScript or another statically typed language. Experience with utility-first CSS frameworks like Tailwind.
• Backend: Strong experience designing and building production APIs in a mature server-side framework such as Ruby on Rails, Django, Laravel, or Node. Experience with GraphQL or a comparable API layer is a plus, as is a track record of picking up a new backend language quickly.
• Data & Analytics: Advanced SQL experience; familiarity with ETL data processing pipelines and alternative storage engines.
• Cloud & DevOps: Hands-on experience with Heroku, AWS services, Docker (local development), and GitHub (CI/CD pipelines, version control).

ATTRIBUTES:

• Strong full-stack architectural mindset, debugging skills, and system design capability.
• Agile development experience with a track record of balancing multiple projects and shifting priorities.
• Multi-tenancy: experience designing and implementing multi-tenant architectures, with a deep understanding of data separation, tenant provisioning, and resource optimization.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills with a collaborative, knowledge-sharing approach.
• Open-source contributions or participation in software development communities are a plus.
• A natural problem-solver who thrives on untangling complex technical challenges and turning ambiguity into elegant, scalable code.