Senior Backend Engineer (PHP)

Key Responsibilities

Build great software:

• Analyze requirements, translate them into technical specifications, and estimate their implementation cost.
• Be a strong individual contributor, actively writing (or teaching AI how to write) high-quality, maintainable, and scalable code.

Contribute to the technical roadmap:

• Identify and prioritise problems, gaps and technical debt in the product.
• Research and evaluate new tools, technologies and frameworks to enhance the product and improve development efficiency.
• Actively ensure the product is technically prepared for future challenges, especially considering security, maintainability, and scalability.

Co-own the product:

• We emphasize the culture of ownership, so our engineers are empowered and encouraged to provide product development suggestions. 
• Provide technical input and insights to Product Managers regarding tradeoffs between scope, engineering capacity, and time constraints.

Raise the quality bar for the team:

• Champion best practices and actively participate in code and design document reviews to ensure high quality.
• Mentor and support other engineers, fostering their growth and development.

Cross-team collaboration

• Maintain communication with other technical teams to avoid duplicate effort, incompatible solutions and solving problems other teams have already resolved.

Who you are

Architecture & Modernization

• Language Mastery & Transition: Possessing 5+ years of professional experience building complex enterprise web applications. You have deep expertise in PHP, but you are future-focused: you will play a key role in transforming our legacy PHP codebase into modern services powered by Golang.
• Event-Driven & Async Communication: You have deep experience implementing Event-Driven Architecture to decouple systems. You are proficient with message brokers—specifically AWS SQS (our primary driver) and Kafka—to orchestrate complex workflows between services.
• Legacy Transformation: You have a proven track record of modernizing legacy systems. You know how to strangle a monolith and migrate functionality without breaking the existing business logic.
• Design Mastery: You hold a mastery of OOP and SOLID principles and apply Domain-Driven Design (DDD) to organize complex logic effectively.

Operational Excellence & Quality

• Observability First: You understand that code isn't "done" until it's observable in production. You implement comprehensive logging, distributed tracing, and monitoring strategies to ensure system health and facilitate rapid debugging.
• Quality & Root Cause Focused: You go beyond basic metrics to focus on deep structural issues. You are willing to dig deep in search of root causes to ensure long-term system health rather than applying quick patches.
• SDLC Expert: You possess a high-level understanding of the entire software development lifecycle, from requirement gathering down to deployment pipelines and infrastructure.

Collaboration & Leadership

• API & Interoperability Specialist: You have experience designing clear, backward-compatible, and future-proof APIs. You are comfortable using gRPC for high-performance inter-service communication, as well as standard RESTful API practices.
• Technical Team Player: You are able to make sound technical decisions, resolve technical conflicts within your scope, and effectively mentor other engineers through the technology transition.
• Clear, Concise Communicator: You possess a high signal-to-noise ratio. You can communicate and collaborate effectively with engineers and non-technical audiences alike.
• Proactive Problem Solver: You identify and troubleshoot technical challenges, using architectural foresight to avoid them before they reach production.

Tech Stack

• Core Backend & Transition: We are currently running PHP (Laravel 11.x) and actively migrating performance-critical components to Golang. We also utilize Python and TypeScript where appropriate.
• Infrastructure & Cloud: AWS (focusing on SQS & EventBridge for async workflows, S3), Docker, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD for GitOps deployments.
• Data & Search: MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and DataBricks.
• Observability: Grafana and Prometheus for real-time monitoring and metrics.

Bonus Points

• Experience with working with strongly structured languages (Java, Kotlin, C#)
• Experience with cloud solutions (GCP, AWS)
• Front-end experience (React, Typescript)
• Experience or having domain knowledge in online payment, eCommerce, credit card processing, risk management, or fraud detection

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