Lead Backend Engineer (PHP / Laravel)

You ll work closely with Product Frontend DevOps and QA to deliver reliable scalable systems and you ll be the person who makes the hard architectural calls and keeps the team moving The right person is equally at home in a code review a system-design discussion and a one-on-one

What You ll Do

Technical Leadership

• Design and build scalable maintainable backend systems and APIs in PHP and Laravel
• Set the technical direction for our backend services and own the major architecture decisions
• Establish and uphold coding standards design patterns and engineering best practices
• Lead code reviews and hold the team to a high bar for quality
• Improve the performance scalability reliability and security of our systems
• Evaluate and introduce new tools and technologies where they earn their place
• Keep technical debt in check without slowing down delivery

Team Leadership

• Lead mentor and develop a team of backend engineers across different experience levels
• Hold regular one-on-ones set clear goals and support each engineer s growth
• Plan and prioritize the team s work and run sprint planning and delivery
• Build a culture where engineers do their best work and support one another
• Interview hire and onboard new engineers as the team grows
• Translate business goals into clear technical plans and represent engineering to stakeholders

Delivery

• Ship well-tested features on time and to a high standard
• Partner with Product Frontend DevOps and QA to deliver end to end
• Communicate progress risks and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences

What We re Looking For

Technical Skills

• Expert-level PHP and deep practical experience with Laravel Eloquent the service container queues events and middleware
• Strong grasp of software architecture and design patterns SOLID dependency injection repository pattern Domain-Driven Design a plus
• A track record of designing and building RESTful APIs GraphQL experience welcome
• Solid relational-database skills MySQL PostgreSQL schema design indexing query optimization and migrations
• Experience with caching and job queues Redis Laravel Horizon RabbitMQ or similar
• Working knowledge of microservices and modular-monolith architectures and the judgment to choose between them
• A disciplined approach to testing with PHPUnit or Pest
• Comfortable with Git CI CD pipelines and Docker
• Hands-on experience with at least one cloud platform AWS GCP or Azure
• Sound understanding of application security and performance tuning at scale

Leadership People Skills

• Proven experience leading or mentoring a team of engineers
• Clear direct communication you can make complex ideas easy to follow
• Strong judgment and problem-solving under real-world constraints
• Comfortable giving and receiving honest feedback
• Solid experience working in Agile Scrum teams
• The ability to balance technical quality against business priorities and deadlines
• A steady constructive approach when priorities shift or pressure rises
• A real interest in helping the people around you grow

Job requirements

• 5 years of backend development much of it in PHP Laravel 2 years leading mentoring or managing engineers A degree in Computer Science or equivalent hands-on experience A history of shipping and running production systems at scale

Nice to Have

• Experience scaling high-traffic high-availability applications
• Familiarity with another language or stack
• Next js Go or Python
• Experience with event-driven architecture and message brokers
• Infrastructure as code Terraform and container orchestration Kubernetes
• Open-source work or an active engineering presence