Contract PHP Engineer (Craft CMS)

About YLD: YLD is a premier, internationally recognized remote-first technology consultancy, product design pioneer, and enterprise software innovator on an absolute mission to help global organizations keep moving forward. Specializing in advanced software engineering, distributed data systems, and human-centric design, YLD partners closely with leading brands to co-create custom digital solutions that continue to deliver immense business value long after the initial delivery is complete. Composed of curious, highly talented change-makers distributed across major hubs like London, Lisbon, and Porto, YLD unifies deep technical expertise with transparent, honesty-driven values to establish a world-class workspace focused on continuous learning, inclusion, and collective engineering mastery.

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly sophisticated, data-minded Senior Software Engineer specializing in PHP and Craft CMS to join our core global Engineering division in a full-time B2B contract capacity within Brazil. In this highly visible software crafter seat, you will embed directly within an experience-led client squad to construct, refine, and scale digital products for an expansive, high-traffic consumer environment. Shifting entirely away from black-box agency arrangements, you will act as a primary technical collaborator, driving day-to-day backend logic, building custom plugin extensions, and managing a large-scale system migration from a legacy architecture onto a modern content platform targeting a mid-2026 launch. This high-agency role demands a seasoned full-stack engineer who writes exceptionally clean PHP, models performant relational schemas, and seamlessly coordinates with product designers to implement pixel-perfect user journeys.

Key Responsibilities

• Craft CMS Application Engineering: Architect, implement, and maintain high-throughput web platform features, utilizing short feedback loops and publishing consistent commits natively using PHP and Craft CMS.
• Content Modeling & Templating: Design extensible data schemas, maintain entry types, and configure template render patterns using Craft CMS’s native content modeling blocks and plugin ecosystem.
• Legacy Enterprise Migration: Claim joint technical ownership over migrating historical asset registries, page parameters, and user logs away from legacy frameworks (such as Epic Server or equivalent) into an optimized Craft core.
• Relational Database Performance Tuning: Code, audit, and refactor data persistence layers, structuring optimized SQL scripts and handling database indexes natively within environments like SQL Server.
• Frictionless API Development: Build and expose robust, secure RESTful APIs and web endpoints, streamlining how the central CMS consumes and surfaces multi-channel developer payload data.
• Frontend Visual Hierarchy Styling: Collaborate alongside dedicated Product Designers to implement accessible, fully responsive frontend view layouts, matching complex UI/UX reworks precisely.
• CI/CD & Version Governance: Participate in agile sprint standups, tracking environment configurations and version targets cleanly via distributed team architectures in Git.
• Production Monitoring & SLAs: Maintain strict operational quality and run live production tracking to safeguard ecosystem uptime parameters in strict compliance with target Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Technical Mentorship & Evangelism: Mentor engineering peers to accelerate growth, keep codebase principles sharp, and showcase functional software advancements during company-wide show-and-tells.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 5+ years of verified professional history running advanced Web development, server-side software engineering, database modeling, or content infrastructure delivery.
• Deep, authoritative technical command writing clean, testable object-oriented code natively in the PHP programming language.
• Hands-on production experience designing custom extensions, templates, and modules explicitly within Craft CMS environments.
• Demonstrated experience executing complex data migrations from outdated or monolithic legacy content management platforms.
• Practical frontend capabilities, showcasing a clear familiarity tracking semantic page elements, responsive styling, and web accessibility standards.
• Strong relational data literacy, with verified history handling query profile analysis and schema creation natively within relational systems (such as SQL Server or MySQL).
• Outstanding interpersonal and communication mechanics, with an absolute capacity to explain complex engineering choices in plain language to non-technical corporate partners.
• Contractual Execution Constraint: Complete availability to engage under an independent B2B contractor model for an initial **3-month timeline** (highlighting strong extensions potential).
• Location Context: Parameters open exclusively to qualified full-stack PHP engineers permanently based anywhere within Brazil to operate 100% remotely from home.

Preferred Strategic Indicators (Nice to Have)

• Prior experience operating in a specialized engineering consultancy capacity or scaling digital products within the Media, Entertainment, or high-traffic consumer retail sectors.
• Familiarity with alternative frontend layout frameworks or script extensions built on top of React, Node.js, or hybrid layouts.
• Active personal habit of utilizing next-generation AI tools and developer utilities safely to maximize code-refactoring efficiency and deployment velocity.
• Proven capacity to remain calm under pressure, debug live production defects, and convey impact summaries clearly to cross-functional teams.

What We Offer

• The exceptional professional canvas to directly direct, code, and define the full-stack architectures driving high-stakes product experiences for an experience-led global organization.
• Highly competitive, capability-calibrated B2B contract remuneration tracks with a predictable pathway for potential contract term extensions.
• Profound work-from-home remote parameters offering total lifestyle autonomy, flexible work arrangements, and an optimal work-life balance standard.
• Integration into an elite, remote-first community of software crafters that lives and breathes a culture of continuous learning, honesty, ethics, and winning together.