Dev required for our Sngine project

We have just started a live Sngine-based social platform and I’m ready to move beyond the core package by introducing new key updates. We are looking for a long term hire, we are privately funded so budgeting is tight and everything is discussed as a team then approved fortnightly.

Here’s the first few updates:

1. When a new user creates an account, we'd like to update step 3 as adding or suggesting random friends is not good for privacy. (check sngine demo for example)
2. Add user-side preferences so members can opt in or out of each notification category from their account settings.
3. The suggested friends or pages in sidebar on users feed MUST have a connection ie a friend likes this or friend of a friend or for pages it must be in the users city or a radius from the user say 100kms otherwise DO NOT SHOW it as it create non relevant suggestions which is worse then suggesting NOTHING.

4. Many more updates planned. ALL tasks will be submitted to the team to quote / accept and milestones will be set for completion and staged along the way.

• Ensure the solution follows Sngine coding standards, is fully commented, and survives core version updates.

Acceptance criteria
1. Notifications appear in the standard Sngine bell icon with unread counts updating via Ajax.
2. Toggling a notification type in the admin panel immediately affects all users.
3. A sample load test shows no more than 100 ms added to average page execution time.
4. All code passes a quick review in PHP 8+ with no warnings from PHPStan Level 5.

If you’ve previously extended Sngine or built similar real-time features in PHP/MySQL, I’d love to see a brief demo. Looking forward to collaborating with someone who knows the platform inside out and can deliver clean, maintainable code fast.