Senior Laravel Backend Engineer

About the Role:

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer with deep experience in PHP and Laravel who can take ownership of core backend services and grow into our Backend Lead.

This is a pure backend role.
 We are also hiring dedicated DevOps and Frontend engineers, so you will not be responsible for infrastructure, CI/CD, or UI implementation. You will collaborate with those teams, but your focus is backend architecture and backend code quality.

  What You Will Do:

• Design, implement, and maintain backend services in PHP/Laravel.
• Own and evolve core backend architecture: APIs, integrations, data models, caching, queues.
• Work with relational and key-value databases, ensuring performance and reliability at scale.
• Lead by example in code quality, testing, and documentation.
• Review code, mentor other backend developers, and help set engineering standards.
• Collaborate closely with:
  • CTO to translate requirements into technical solutions.
  • DevOps engineers for deployments, observability, and reliability (without owning infra).
  • Frontend engineers on API design and contracts (without doing frontend work).
• Contribute to improving CI/CD and observability from the backend perspective (requirements, standards, feedback).

Must-Have Skills:

• 5+ years of professional experience with PHP, including several years with Laravel.
• Strong understanding of Object-Oriented Programming and clean code practices.
• Solid grasp of SOLID principles and common design patterns.
• Strong experience with relational and also key-value databases and writing complex SQL queries.
• Hands-on experience with:
• • MySQL (primary relational database)
  • Redis (caching, queues, key-value storage)
  • Docker (containerizing and running services)
• Comfortable working in Linux-based environments.
• Ability to take ownership of backend projects end-to-end and make architectural decisions.
• Strong communication skills and willingness to mentor other backend developers.

Nice-to-Have / Plus:

• Experience with:
  • MongoDB
  • InfluxDB or other time-series databases
  • RabbitMQ or other message brokers
  • Video streaming pipelines or media processing
• Experience with:
  • Python or Go for services, tooling, or scripting
• Familiarity with DevOps concepts (to work effectively with our DevOps team):
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Monitoring, logging, performance tuning

What You Will Not Do:

• No HTML/CSS or Blade/Laravel templating work.
• No frontend frameworks (React, etc.).
• No primary responsibility for DevOps, infrastructure, or CI/CD pipelines.

Your responsibility is backend systems: design, code, data, performance, and leading the backend discipline.

Growth Path

• Short-term: Own major backend services, drive technical decisions, become the go-to person for Laravel and backend architecture.
• Mid-term: Evolve into Backend Lead, responsible for:
  • Technical direction of backend systems
  • Mentoring and growing the backend team
  • Defining and enforcing backend engineering standards and best practices.