Senior Full-Stack Web Engineer (Performance & SEO-Focused)

APPLY

https://nxtgen-intel.com/careers

R O L E  P U R P O S E

You build the websites NextGen ships for clients and for our own products: marketing sites, product sites and web platforms that load in under two seconds, get found by both search engines and AI answer engines, and turn visitors into enquiries. This is not template work. You write real code, own performance budgets like they are invoices, and treat a website as a product with a job, not a brochure with a URL.

•   Owns website builds end to end: architecture, build, launch, and the performance numbers afterwards.

•   Ships modern stacks (React / Next.js, headless CMS) where they earn their keep, and simpler stacks where they don't.

•   Keeps Core Web Vitals green on real devices and real South African networks, not just Lighthouse on a MacBook.

•   Builds sites that are structured for SEO and AI search from the first commit, working with our AI-Search Strategist.

T H E  E N V I R O N M E N T  Y O U ' L L  W O R K  I N

NextGen Intelligence is a senior-only engineering practice. Anyone can prompt an app into existence now; we hire the people who make it scale, hold up, and pass an audit. The environment you'd be walking into:

•   Senior only, by design. No junior pool, no offshore tier, no bench. The person who scopes the work is the person who does it.

•   End to end, no handoffs. You sit on the first client call, you build the thing, you hand it over. No analyst in the middle turning your work into a brief and back again.

•   Fully remote. The team works across South Africa, the USA, Mauritius, Brazil and Sri Lanka, anchored on South African time zones (SAST, UTC+2).

•   Client work and our own products. Twelve products and counting carry the NextGen name, and there is room to build things that carry your fingerprints too, with the upside that comes with it.

•   AI-assisted tooling as standard. A small senior team that moves like a large one. We read whole codebases, not samples, and ship working software while others are still writing the proposal.

•   Websites are a first-class product here, not a side hustle. Our Smart Websites line means your work carries revenue, reputation and rankings.

K E Y  R E S P O N S I B I L I T I E S

1. Website Architecture & Build

The right stack for the job, built properly.

•   Design and build websites in modern stacks: React / Next.js, TypeScript, and headless CMS platforms the client's team can actually use.

•   Choose boring technology on purpose when it serves the client better; defend the choice either way.

•   Build reusable component systems so the second page costs a fraction of the first.

•   Handle hosting, domains, SSL, CDNs and deployment pipelines so launches are a non-event.

2. Performance & Reliability

Speed is a feature, and it is your feature.

•   Own Core Web Vitals: set performance budgets per project and keep them, measured on mid-range phones and real networks.

•   Optimise images, fonts, scripts and third-party tags; kill the marketing pixel that costs a second of load time, and explain why.

•   Keep sites up and monitored: uptime checks, error tracking and a plan for when something breaks at a bad hour.

•   Run performance audits on inherited sites and turn the findings into fixes, not decks.

3. SEO, GEO & Findability

Built to be found, by crawlers and by models.

•   Implement technical SEO properly: semantic markup, structured data, sitemaps, canonical logic, clean rendering for crawlers.

•   Structure content and markup so AI answer engines can extract and cite it, working with the AI-Search Strategist's briefs.

•   Keep redirects, migrations and relaunches from torching rankings the client spent years earning.

•   Wire up analytics and search console data so decisions run on evidence.

4. Conversion & Integrations

A website has a job. You wire it to do that job.

•   Build forms, booking flows, quote tools and payment steps that work first time on a phone.

•   Integrate CRMs, email platforms, WhatsApp and analytics so leads land where the client works, not in an inbox nobody reads.

•   Add AI-backed features where they earn their place: site chat, search, content personalisation, with honest fallbacks.

•   A/B test with the Conversion Designer and Growth Engineer, and let the numbers pick the winner.

5. Client Delivery

You are on the calls, because you are the one building it.

•   Scope website projects with founders and clients: what it costs, what it takes, what it will do.

•   Translate brand and design intent into a build plan without a handoff chain in between.

•   Train client teams on their CMS so they can run the site without phoning us for a comma change.

•   Hand over documented, maintainable work: another senior developer could extend your site without an archaeology phase.

R E Q U I R E D  S K I L L S  &  E X P E R I E N C E

Area

Requirement

Priority

Modern web stack

5+ years building production websites; strong React / Next.js and TypeScript, with shipped sites you can point at.

Must

Core web craft

Deep HTML, CSS and JavaScript fundamentals; you can build without a framework when the job calls for it.

Must

Performance

A track record of fast sites: Core Web Vitals, budgets, and the discipline to keep them green.

Must

Headless CMS

Production experience with at least one: Sanity, Contentful, Strapi, Payload or similar.

Must

Technical SEO

Structured data, rendering strategy, migrations and redirects handled without losing rankings.

Must

Responsive & accessible

Sites that work on a mid-range Android over mobile data, and meet sensible accessibility standards.

Must

Deployment & hosting

Comfortable with Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare or cloud hosting, DNS, SSL and CI pipelines.

Must

Integrations

APIs, webhooks, CRM and analytics integrations built and debugged yourself.

Strongly rec.

AI features on the web

Experience adding LLM-backed chat, search or personalisation to a live site.

Strongly rec.

Client communication

Explaining technical trade-offs to non-technical clients, plainly and without hand-waving.

Strongly rec.

Nice to have

•   WordPress or Shopify depth for inherited estates; plenty of clients arrive with one.

•   Animation and interaction craft: tasteful motion that serves the content, not a portfolio piece.

•   Experience with GEO / AI-search optimisation beyond classic SEO.

•   Design sensibility strong enough to make good calls when the mock doesn't cover the edge case.

•   Experience building for African markets: low bandwidth, data cost awareness, older devices.

W H A T  S U C C E S S  L O O K S  L I K E

•   Sites launch on time and stay green: Core Web Vitals passing on real devices three months after launch, not just launch week.

•   Search performance holds or climbs through builds and migrations; no ranking cliffs on your watch.

•   Conversion numbers move: enquiries, sign-ups or sales attributable to the sites you build and improve.

•   Clients can run their own CMS after handover, and say so.

•   Another senior developer can extend your codebase without a guided tour.

•   Zero avoidable launch-day surprises: DNS, SSL, redirects and forms all boringly fine.

H O W  Y O U  W O R K

Craft

Sweats the fundamentals: markup, speed and detail, because that is where websites are won.

Plain speech

Tells a client what the site needs and what it doesn't, without jargon and without flattery.

Ownership

Ships it, monitors it, and owns it when the contact form breaks on a Friday night.

H O W  W E  H I R E

01. Show us your work. Send what you've built, not a polished CV. A repo, a product, a campaign, or a system you're proud of.

02. A real conversation. A technical talk with a founder about decisions you've actually made, and why.

03. A paid exercise. A short, paid piece of real-shaped work. We don't ask senior people to work for free.

04. Meet the founders. You meet the people setting the bar, and we agree how you'd fit and what you'd own.

Apply at nxtgen-intel.com/careers or write to [email protected]. A founder reads every application and you hear back either way.

• Anyone can publish a website in an afternoon now. Building one that is fast, found and quietly doing its job a year later is engineering. That's the work.