34 - Senior PHP Engineer

We're looking for a PHP engineer to join a backend team and own services end-to-end — architecture, integrations, testing, and what happens to them once they're live.

You'll be handed a problem area rather than a fully specified spec, and the expectation is that you work out how the service should be shaped, build it, and then own it in production. The setup is distributed and fast-moving: decisions get made in writing, work gets picked up across time zones, and nobody is standing over you.

What you'll be doing

• Designing, building and owning PHP services end-to-end — primarily in Laravel

• Making architecture decisions on service boundaries, domain models and how services talk to each other

• Building and maintaining REST APIs and backend integrations with third-party systems

• Modelling business logic with Domain-Driven Design rather than pushing it into controllers

• Working with event-driven patterns — message flows, event sourcing where it earns its place

• Writing tests that let the team change the code later with confidence

• Working with MySQL/Postgres: schema design, queries, and the performance problems that show up at scale

• Deploying and operating your services through Docker and CI/CD on cloud infrastructure

• Debugging and improving what's already running, not only shipping new features

Required skills and experience

• 5+ years of professional PHP experience — production systems, not course or side projects

• Laravel — strong, hands-on. This is the primary framework of the role.

• Domain-Driven Design — you can model a domain and explain the boundaries you drew

• Microservices and event-driven design — you've built and operated them, including the failure modes

• Event sourcing — practical experience, and judgement about when it's the wrong tool

• REST API design and backend integrations with external systems

• MySQL and/or PostgreSQL — schema design and query optimisation

• One major cloud platform (AWS, GCP or Azure), plus Docker and CI/CD pipelines

• Automated testing as a normal part of how you work

• Professional English, written and spoken — clear, and clear in writing especially

• Comfortable owning a topic independently in a fully remote team, and reliable about responding when someone is blocked on you

Nice to have

• Symfony, Lumen, CodeIgniter or CakePHP

• Message brokers or queues (RabbitMQ, SQS, Kafka)

• Infrastructure as code, or monitoring and observability tooling

• Performance work on high-traffic PHP systems

• Experience in a distributed team spanning several time zones

Who you are

• Autonomous — you take a topic and run with it without needing close supervision

• Pragmatic — you pick the architecture the problem justifies, not the most interesting one

• A reliable, timely communicator — you close the loop, and you flag problems early rather than at the deadline