Walk into almost any trading office, hospital, or school admin block in Gwalior and you'll find a web application running quietly in the background that nobody outside the IT room ever thinks about. It was probably built six or seven years ago, it still runs on CodeIgniter, and it still does its job: tracking inventory, logging student attendance, managing dealer invoices. The company that built it may have moved on, but the panel hasn't gone anywhere, and somebody still has to keep it alive.
Old code, real business, steady work
This is the part of software work that doesn't get talked about much because it isn't glamorous. A distributor in Lashkar needs a new column added to his stock report. A coaching institute near City Centre wants its fee-receipt generator to also email parents automatically. A transport firm's booking panel throws an error every time someone uploads a PDF over 2MB. None of this is exciting in the way a greenfield project is, but it pays, it's local, and it never really runs out. Small and mid-sized businesses across Madhya Pradesh built or bought these tools years ago and have no appetite to rebuild them from scratch — they just need someone who can open the codebase, understand what an earlier developer wrote, and fix or extend it without breaking three other things.
That's the market this job sits inside. Admin panels for order management, basic CRMs glued together with jQuery AJAX calls, attendance and fee-tracking systems for schools, dealer and vendor portals for small manufacturers — these are the bread-and-butter applications that keep a lot of Gwalior's commercial lanes running, and most of them were written in core PHP or on the CodeIgniter framework because that's what was cheap and fast a decade ago. Maintaining, patching, and gradually modernizing this kind of software is dependable work, and it's the work this role is actually built around.
We're hiring a PHP CodeIgniter Developer for this specific seat because that's exactly the skillset these panels need — someone who can read CodeIgniter's folder structure, trace a bug back through a model and a controller, and ship a fix without breaking the three other modules that quietly depend on the same database table.
Who's hiring, and why Gwalior
Devmixa is a small web design and digital marketing team based in Bhopal. We've spent the last few years building websites, admin dashboards, and marketing campaigns for clients across Madhya Pradesh, and a growing share of our client base now sits in and around Gwalior — retailers, clinics, small manufacturers, a couple of coaching centres. Rather than keep managing their support tickets remotely from Bhopal, we're opening a seat here, right in City Centre, so there's someone local who can actually sit with a client, look at their screen, and sort things out the same day. That's the hire we're making.
You won't be the only developer in the company, but you will be the person on the ground in Gwalior, which means you'll get real ownership of the projects assigned to you rather than being one more name buried in a large team.
What the work actually looks like week to week
- Picking up bug reports and small change requests on existing CodeIgniter admin panels — things like a broken date filter, a report that's summing the wrong column, or a dropdown that needs a new option
- Writing new features into existing MVC-structured codebases: a new module for an inventory panel, an export-to-Excel button, a notification email that wasn't there before
- Building and wiring up MySQL queries and schema changes without wrecking existing data or breaking other modules that depend on the same tables
- Working with jQuery and AJAX to make pages feel responsive instead of reloading for every click, and tidying up front-end layouts with Bootstrap where needed
- Hooking panels up to third-party APIs — SMS gateways, payment gateways, sometimes a basic WhatsApp notification service
- Routine website maintenance for client sites: WordPress-adjacent tweaks, security patching, performance fixes, form issues
- Talking to clients directly when needed, understanding what they actually want (which is often different from what they typed in the email), and translating that into a working change
Skills we're actually looking for
We need someone comfortable in core PHP first — if you understand how PHP handles requests, sessions, and data without a framework holding your hand, picking up CodeIgniter 4's conventions is quick. Working knowledge of the MVC pattern matters more than memorizing every helper function in the framework. You should be able to write and debug MySQL queries, including joins across a handful of tables, without needing someone to hold your hand. Basic jQuery and AJAX experience helps a lot since most of the panels we maintain use it for inline edits and live filters. Familiarity with Bootstrap for quick front-end fixes is useful, and any exposure to integrating external APIs — payment, SMS, or otherwise — is a bonus, not a requirement.
We're less interested in which college you went to and more interested in whether you can sit with an unfamiliar 2,000-line controller file and figure out what it's doing within an hour. That instinct either comes naturally or it develops fast on the job — either way, we can work with it.
Who this suits
Freshers are genuinely welcome here. If you've built even a couple of small CodeIgniter or core PHP projects — a college assignment, a personal admin tool, anything where you touched a database and wrote some business logic — that's enough of a base. We'd rather hire someone with the right instincts and train them on our specific codebases than wait indefinitely for a perfect resume. The starting salary for freshers runs ₹12,000 to ₹18,000 a month, and it moves up quickly once you're handling tickets independently, with developers at the two-to-four-year mark earning ₹22,000 to ₹38,000 a month (roughly ₹2.5 to ₹4.5 LPA) depending on how much ownership they've taken on.
If you've already got two to four years in and have been doing similar maintenance-and-feature work elsewhere in Gwalior or Bhopal, you'll likely move faster into the higher end of that band — we care more about how quickly you can get oriented in someone else's code than about years on paper.
Where you'll actually sit
The office is in City Centre, Gwalior, 474011 — easy enough to reach whether you're coming from Lashkar, Morar, or the City Centre area itself. This is an on-site, full-time role; we're not set up for remote work on this particular seat because part of the job is being physically available when a client wants to walk in and show you something on their screen instead of describing it over a call.
How we hire
We keep the process short. Send your resume, and if it looks like a reasonable fit, we'll call you in for a face-to-face round at the Gwalior office rather than stretching things over multiple video calls. Expect a short technical conversation — nothing designed to trip you up, just enough to see how you think through a PHP or MySQL problem — followed by a chat about the kind of client work you'd actually be doing. We try to get back to candidates within a few days either way, because we know waiting around for weeks after an interview is nobody's idea of a good process.
If you're based in Gwalior, know your way around CodeIgniter or core PHP, and like the idea of being the developer people in City Centre actually walk up to with their admin panel problems, this is worth applying for.
Growing with the role
Most people who join as fresh graduates on this kind of ticket-and-maintenance work assume it's a dead end, but it rarely plays out that way. Six months of fixing other people's CodeIgniter code teaches you more about how real applications fail than a year of building toy projects from scratch ever could — you start to notice patterns, learn which shortcuts cause problems three months later, and get faster at reading a stranger's logic. Several of our current developers started exactly here: fixing small tickets, then owning a full client account, then building new panels from the ground up instead of just patching old ones.
There's also room to pick up adjacent skills on the job. If you're curious about REST APIs, we'll put you on the next integration task. If you want to get better at front-end work, there are plenty of Bootstrap-based dashboards that need a cleaner interface. We don't lock people into one narrow lane for years; the work naturally pulls you toward whatever you're good at, as long as the core PHP and CodeIgniter fundamentals are solid to begin with.
Devmixa isn't a large company and we're not pretending otherwise — it's a small, hands-on team, and that means your manager will actually know what you're working on day to day, for better and worse. For someone who wants to be treated as a name on a spreadsheet, that's probably not appealing. For someone who wants to be noticed when they do good work and corrected quickly when something goes wrong, it tends to be a better place to start a career than a large outsourcing floor where tickets get assigned by a queue and nobody ever learns your name.