Senior Backend Software Engineer (PHP / Laravel)

What you’ll work on

Job Summary

Responsibilities

• Own and lead backend initiatives end-to-end: discovery, technical design, delivery, rollout, and iteration.
• Architect, build, and maintain backend services and REST APIs using Laravel/PHP.
• Drive system performance and production reliability (monitoring, incident response, root-cause fixes).
• Embed security into development with secure coding practices, least-privilege access, secrets handling, audit logging, encryption where appropriate. Support evidence collection for audits (policies, controls, change history, traceability)
• Design and evolve data models; manage migrations and ensure data integrity for MySQL and other database technologies.
• Establish and uplift engineering standards: code quality, testing strategy, API conventions, observability, and security practices.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to translate product requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, reviews, and guidance on architecture and best practices.
• Create and maintain clear technical documentation (APIs, runbooks, architectural decision records).

Requirements

• 5+ years building production backend systems, including 3+ years with PHP and Laravel.
• Proven experience designing scalable backend architectures.
• Strong relational database expertise (PostgreSQL/MySQL): schema design, indexing, query plans, migrations, and performance tuning.
• Strong API design experience (versioning, authentication/authorization, pagination, error handling, rate limiting).
• Strong testing mindset and execution (unit/feature/integration; PHPUnit/Pest) and comfort improving legacy code safely.
• Experience with production operations: debugging, monitoring, incident response, and postmortems.
• Strong communication and ability to lead technical discussions in a remote, cross-functional team.

Nice to have