About YONDER

Who we are

YONDER (previously Yonder Media) was founded in 2002 as a specialised mobile media agency. Over many years, its tech prominency grew, particularly in the area of non-app mobile development (such as SMS, USSD, WhatsApp, Messenger etc.) as well as a strong focus in integrating to social media.

YONDER was acquired by GroupM (a WPP company) in 2015, with a solid focus on its tech and development offerings.

Through this, YONDER now works exclusively with "blue chip" clients, such as KFC, Shoprite, Checkers, Colgate-Palmolive to deliver groundbreaking platforms and infrastructures that help them reach their clients all through the African continent and beyond.
We've built e-commerce platforms, loyalty systems, communication ecosystems, and so many more. To most of our clients, we're their "experimental providers", asking us to build the kind of new thinking ideas that haven't yet been explored by their competitors.

YONDER has offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town, although its development department is a remote work-from-home outfit.

In addition to the amazing ways we're making platforms like WhatsApp bend to our will, we're a Meta (Facebook) Certified Partner, and rapidly coming to dominate the Metaverse for our clients.

YONDER has won over 64 national and international awards, including Loeries and the MMA's Best in Show

Our tech

We're very much out-of-the-box, blue (yonder) horizon thinkers, so our tech team reflects this as being a mixed collection of creative and technical skills.

We use open-source systems, favouring Laravel on PHP, with MariaDB and MySQL, running on Linux architecture. That being said, we don't get too hung up on this: many of best devs started out life in .NET and Java, and made the transition. If you're good enough, one programming language to another differs only in syntax.

Tools we tend to rely on include: Discord, Slack, Workbook, SiSense, PHPStorm, SQLYog, Github, Postman, Vagrant, NewRelic and many, many others.

The interview process

1. Meet & greet with Head of Development (30 mins - 1 hour)
2. Take-home coding technical assessment (up to 3 days)
3. Q&A with the larger team (30 mins)
4. References and background checks
5. Collect your gear, and embark on a new career with YONDER