Senior PHP Backend Engineer

About the Role
We are looking for an experienced Senior PHP Backend Engineer to join our backend team and help us build and evolve reliable, scalable, and maintainable systems.
The role is focused on backend development with PHP and Laravel, with strong involvement in architecture, database design, performance, code quality, and technical decision-making.
We are looking for someone who is comfortable working with complex production systems, can take ownership of technical solutions, and is able to contribute beyond individual feature development.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain backend services using PHP and Laravel.
• Build and evolve scalable APIs and backend architecture.
• Work with relational databases and optimize application performance.
• Participate in architecture discussions and technical decision-making.
• Review code and help maintain high engineering standards across the team.
• Investigate and resolve production issues and performance bottlenecks.
• Improve reliability, maintainability, and scalability of existing systems.
• Collaborate with Product, QA, DevOps, and Frontend teams.
• Support and mentor other backend developers where needed.

Requirements

• Strong commercial experience with PHP.
• Strong experience with Laravel or similar modern PHP frameworks.
• Solid understanding of object-oriented programming and software design principles.
• Strong knowledge of MySQL and relational database design.
• Experience with database performance optimization and working with large datasets.
• Experience with Redis and caching strategies.
• Good understanding of REST API design.
• Experience working with asynchronous processing, queues, and background jobs.
• Understanding of scalable and distributed backend systems.
• Experience with Docker and modern development environments.
• Good knowledge of Git and CI/CD workflows.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code.
• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills.
• Ability to work independently and take ownership of technical tasks.

Nice to Have

• Strong application security knowledge.
• Experience with secure coding practices and OWASP recommendations.
• Experience identifying vulnerabilities such as SSRF, IDOR, SQL Injection, XSS, CSRF, and authorization issues.
• Experience with security-focused code reviews or penetration testing.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging systems such as Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience designing high-load or distributed systems.

What We Value
We are looking for engineers who understand not only how to implement a solution, but also why a particular solution is appropriate.
We value practical engineering experience, ownership, strong technical judgment, attention to code quality, and the ability to make sensible architectural decisions in real production environments.