PHP Tech Lead

Alcor is global engineering infrastructure for technology companies building international engineering organizations as true in-house teams - not outsourcing. We help ambitious product companies hire senior engineers across Eastern Europe & Latin America who become full members of the team from day one, wearing the company hoodie, not a vendor badge.

Trusted by unicorns like Teladoc, Ledger, Pindrop, People.ai, UFORCE and by private-equity firms such as NMC ($50B AUM) who send us their portfolio companies for fast, cost-efficient ramp-ups in the region.

We make it happen through:

• Senior technical recruiting - sourcing the top 10% of engineering talent across Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina.
• Embedded employment infrastructure (EOR/COR) - so clients can hire compliantly in a new country without opening a local entity themselves.
• Local operational & compliance execution - legal, tax, and HR handled on the ground across every market we operate in.
• Equipment purchases, office rent & other back-office support.

Information about the project:

Building Alcor OS is strategically positioned to be one of the top priorities for Alcor. Alcor OS is our all-in-one platform for managing every contractor we place: contracts, approvals, payroll, time off, and reporting, all in one place, replacing the Excel files and long email threads that global workforce management usually runs on. Unlike traditional CRM systems, Alcor OS is designed to be a technically complex solution, setting a new standard in global workforce management.

We are hiring an experienced engineer to lead the technical strategy of Alcor OS. In this role, you will be responsible for defining the tech vision, and product architecture, crafting and executing a technology roadmap, and overseeing the development team. As a key member of our dedicated Alcor OS team, you will contribute to the strategic direction of our company and play a pivotal role in building a best-in-class contractor management platform. Join us in reshaping the future!

Responsibilities:

• Own delivery for Alcor OS - scope the work, sequence it realistically, and tell us early when something’s going to slip;
• Own production health - reliability, performance, security, and technical debt are your calls to make and your outcomes to answer for;
• Set the technical bar for a small team (2 engineers, 2 QAs today) - this isn’t a management role, but you’ll mentor, unblock, and have a say in hiring as the team grows.
• Direct reporting and close cooperation with the COO.

Qualifications:

• Technical Expertise: proven track record of solving complex technical challenges.
• Entrepreneurship mindset (self-driven): ability to translate business needs into technical solutions, ability to balance technical excellence with business needs, with proven ability to push new initiatives and manage ongoing projects.
• Innovative Thinking (AI): ability to suggest innovative solutions & improvements, staying updated on the latest industry trends and technologies.
• Strategic Vision: capability to align technical strategies with overall business objectives.
• Communication and Collaboration: ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams, including non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience Security: understanding of how to design and build secure systems.
• People leadership: comfortable raising the level of the people around you - mentoring, unblocking, and having the honest conversation when something isn’t good enough.

Requirements:

We need someone who can go deep on PHP and also step back and own the whole system. Years of Laravel experience matter less to us than how you think.

Baseline:

• 4+ years as a Tech Lead, Principal Engineer, or Architect - owning architecture decisions, not just delivering tickets as a senior engineer;
• 8+ years writing PHP professionally, with real depth in Laravel - you should be able to explain what’s happening under the framework, not just use it;
• Comfortable with (or genuinely excited to quickly get comfortable with) Domain-Driven Design, CQRS, and Event Sourcing - our platform’s write side lives in event streams and aggregates, not Eloquent models with mutable rows. You don’t need prior production experience with this exact stack, but “I’ve read about it” isn’t enough either;
• Comfortable working across cloud platforms (AWS or equivalent) - compute, storage, and networking trade-offs, not just spinning up services;
• Practical experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar);
• Strong relational data modeling in MySQL, and - because much of our state is event-sourced - comfort modeling aggregates and domain events, not just normalized tables. For a product like Alcor OS, this modeling is the product;
• A real testing discipline (TDD/BDD, PHPUnit or equivalent) end to end - from unit tests around domain logic up to browser-level E2E (Playwright or equivalent) around real user flows. With an architecture like ours, tests are what let you change things with confidence instead of hoping;
• GitHub-based CI/CD workflows.

What we weigh more than any of the above:

• System design - can you take a fuzzy business problem (e.g. “handle payroll across 40 clients with different rules”) and turn it into an architecture with real trade-offs, not a diagram from a course;
• Data architecture - how you’d model something like contracts, approvals, payroll, and time tracking, where a wrong schema quietly breaks the platform months later;
• Helicopter view - can you step back from a single feature and see how it touches the rest of the system, other teams, and where it’ll hurt a year from now;
• Judgment on AI-generated code - this isn’t “have you used Copilot.” Our engineering process is built around AI agents that plan, implement, test, and review code alongside us. We need someone who can direct that process, catch when it’s confidently wrong, and take full ownership of anything that ships - regardless of who or what drafted it first.

What We Offer:

Culture: Join a supportive and driven team with a strong corporate culture built on openness, collaboration, self-development, and shared ambition.

Tool subscriptions: access to paid AI tools and other platforms to boost efficiency and support learning.

Terms: we offer a flexible 8-hour work schedule.

Time Off Benefits: 20 fully covered days off, 3 additional days off, fully paid sick leave, days off for all national public holidays, a mental health day off to recharge after stressful events.

Pet-friendly office in Kyiv: if you are in Kyiv, bring your furry friends to work with you.

Supporting Ukraine: we proudly donate monthly to the Armed Forces, supporting colleagues’ fundraising projects.

IT kit provided: we equip you with devices for work.

Recruitment flow:

• HR interview;
• A code assignment;
• Technical interview;
• Final Interview with the COO, HRD, and Product Manager.

If building a best-in-class platform from a technical leadership position sounds like your next move - apply now.