Experienced Symfony Developer

Experienced Symfony Developer - Steward Platform

Steward is a mission-driven private lender financing the growth of regenerative agriculture (lenders fund agricultural loans, borrowers repay, platform handles distribution). We need an experienced developer who can work independently on a mature production codebase.

Stack

• Symfony 7.4 / PHP 8.5

• MariaDB 10.11

• Doctrine ORM

• Bootstrap + Stimulus frontend

• Dwolla, Plaid (ACH payments)

• PHPUnit

What you’ll work on

• Repayment schedules & amortization logic (interest calculations, re-amortization, missed payments, transaction ledgers)

• Lender/borrower distribution accuracy

• Performance (query optimization, N+1 fixes) on a 10-year-old codebase

• Security review around financial operations and ACH transfers

• Incremental refactoring of legacy patterns

Engagement

• Fixed-price, 3-month mission

• Budget: $26,000–$39,000 for the full 3 months, depending on seniority/region

• Strong performance can lead to regular collaboration or a full-time role

Must-haves

• 6+ years of professional PHP experience, with at least 3+ years deep in Symfony. This is not a “learned it on a course” role

• Proven track record owning production systems end-to-end, not just contributing tickets on a larger team

• Confident with financial/monetary calculations (precision matters: bcmath/decimal handling); prior fintech, banking, or payments experience strongly preferred

• Comfortable navigating and refactoring a 10-year-old codebase without a map

• Able to overlap with US Pacific Time work hours for meetings and real-time communication

• Genuinely self-directed: can read unfamiliar code, form a plan, and execute without hand-holding or detailed specs. We have limited time to onboard

• Experience with payment processors (Dwolla, Stripe, Plaid, ACH, etc.)

Not a fit if

• You have under 6 years of experience or are still building Symfony fundamentals

• You need detailed specs, close supervision, or frequent check-ins to make progress

• You haven’t worked on a codebase where financial precision or compliance was a real concern

• You’re new to Symfony or financial/fintech codebases