We're hiring a **Lead Backend Engineer** to lead the team that builds and maintains our backend platform. This is a hands-on role — you'll write production PHP and Laravel code while setting technical direction, mentoring engineers, and owning the quality and architecture of what your team ships.
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.
[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.
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