Lead Backend Developer (PHP / Symfony)
Oxylabs · Vilnius, Vilnius County, Lithuania · €78K–€88K/yr
IT Services and IT Consulting · 201-500 employees
About the role
Lead, mentor, and support a Dashboard squad while remaining hands-on in code for 50% of the time. Drive architecture decisions, oversee the full development lifecycle, and raise engineering standards across the team.
What they look for
Requirements
Deep experience with PHP and Symfony 7 is required, along with practical skills in MySQL, Kafka, and containerization tools. Candidates must possess strong architectural knowledge and the ability to mentor senior and mid-level engineers.
Benefits
Full description
We’re a team of 500+ professionals who develop cutting-edge proxy and web data scraping solutions for thousands of the world’s best known businesses, including Fortune 500 companies.
What’s in store for you:
You’ll be solving complex challenges and maintaining our own infrastructure with 60PB+ monthly data traffic. Here are its scale and maturity in numbers:
- 6PB+ Ceph storage
- 60PB+ monthly data traffic through our systems
- 300k+ service requests/sec processed
- 500k+ Kafka messages/sec streamed
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The team waiting for you:Our Dashboard team owns the self-service platform every Oxylabs customer uses - the product that directly moves company revenue. You'll step in as the hands-on Tech Lead for one of our squads (PLAG or EP), working side by side with our Principal Engineer and setting the technical bar for ~14 engineers across two squads. We're mid-way through a major V3 architecture migration and scaling fast, so this is a timely moment to join: there's real architectural room here to make meaningful decisions, not just execute someone else's design.
In this role, you will:
- Lead, mentor, and support one Dashboard squad while staying deeply hands-on in code - this is a genuine 50% IC role
- Design and develop scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems across our Symfony 7 backend
- Own the full development lifecycle for major features - from technical design and RFCs to deployment and production support
- Drive architecture decisions in partnership with our Principal Engineer and help finish shipping the V3 migration
- Raise engineering standards across code review, testing discipline, incident response, and observability
- Contribute to cross-team architecture at the Dashboard product level, including Payments integration and outbox/Kafka patterns
- Apply our leadership principles to guide your team and drive results
Your skills & experiences:
- Deep PHP experience with Symfony strongly preferred (we're on Symfony 7.2 / PHP 8.3), plus practical MySQL 8 skills - query optimisation, indexing, and migrations at scale
- Hands-on experience with Kafka, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, and GitLab CI
- Solid architecture chops - event-driven patterns (outbox), dual-database designs, and API design
- Able to guide technical decisions, review designs and code, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers
- A clear communicator who takes ownership, enjoys knowledge sharing, and gives constructive feedback
Nice to have:
- Experience with payments/billing systems
- DevOps/SRE inclinations, or prior work on multi-tenant self-service platforms.
Tech stack:
- PHP 8.3, Symfony 7.2
- MySQL 8, Redis, Kafka (outbox pattern)
- Kubernetes, GitLab CI, Docker
- Dual DB: Dashboard DB (users, products) + Payments DB (transactions, billing)
- Frontend: React 19 / RTK Query
Salary & Benefits:
- Gross salary: 6500 - 7300 EUR/month. Keep in mind that we are open to discuss a different salary based on your skills and competencies.
- Growth & Learning: 40+ internal learning options, external conferences, mentorship, and year-round knowledge-sharing.
- Health & Well-being: Private health insurance, psychotherapy, on-site well-being consultants, 24/7 gym access, and a wellness app.
- Celebration & Community: Team events, an overseas workation, quarterly team-building budgets, and plenty of ways to mark milestones together.
- Plus bonus vacation days, paid life-moment days off, barista coffee, and all the tools you need. See the full list of benefits here: https://career.oxylabs.io/blog/our-work-benefits/
\nUp for the challenge? Let’s talk!