Native PHP Developer

Pragmatike is recruiting on behalf of a global leader in mobile payment and digital content monetization. Operating across 60+ countries, our client connects telecom operators, merchants, content providers, media companies and brands, powering billing capabilities (Direct Carrier Billing, Mobile Money, Local Payment Methods), content distribution, interactivity programs and multi-channel activations. Their platforms process high-volume transactions and seamless user journeys at scale.

Professional Background:

We're looking for a Native PHP Developer with 5 to 10 years of experience building and maintaining high-throughput, production-grade backend systems. You should have strong command of core (vanilla) PHP, not just framework-driven development, and direct experience with transaction-heavy, mission-critical applications. Experience in payments, billing, telecom, or any high-availability transactional environment is a strong plus. Autonomy, rigor, and problem-solving are essential, as is comfort working independently in a distributed, cross-timezone team.

Your Responsibilities:

• Design, develop and maintain robust backend services in native PHP (7/8), with clean, testable and well-documented code.
• Build and optimize high-volume transaction and billing workflows, ensuring reliability, idempotency and data integrity at scale.
• Develop and maintain REST/SOAP APIs for operator, merchant and third-party integrations.
• Work with relational databases (MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL): schema design, query optimization, indexing and performance tuning.
• Integrate with external systems and gateways (payment, messaging/SMS, USSD, carrier connections, monitoring, billing).
• Implement asynchronous processing using message queues (RabbitMQ, Kafka) and caching layers (Redis/Memcached).
• Ensure application security, resilience and observability (logging, metrics, alerting) in a high-availability context.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, code reviews, and Git-based workflows.
• Collaborate with product, ops and QA teams to ship, monitor and continuously improve services in production.

What You Bring:

• Expert-level native/core PHP (7/8), solid OOP, design patterns, and clean architecture.
• Proven experience with high-throughput, transactional backend systems (mandatory).
• Strong SQL skills (MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL): modeling, optimization, debugging.
• Solid experience designing and consuming REST/SOAP APIs.
• Comfort with Linux environments, Git and CI/CD workflows.
• Familiarity with message queues (RabbitMQ/Kafka), caching (Redis), and asynchronous processing.
• Good understanding of application security and data integrity in sensitive/financial contexts.
• Fluent English and the ability to work autonomously across timezones.

Nice To Have:

• Exposure to payment, billing, or telecom platforms (DCB, Premium SMS, USSD, Mobile Money, LPM).
• Experience with a modern PHP framework (Symfony, Laravel) alongside native PHP.
• Docker / containerization and basic CI/CD tooling.
• Familiarity with monitoring/logging stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Graylog).
• Awareness of PCI-DSS or other security/compliance standards.

Our client is a well-established, international player shaping the future of mobile payments and digital monetization, connecting operators, merchants and brands across dozens of markets. You'll work on platforms that process transactions at real scale, in a dynamic and fast-paced environment that values autonomy, ownership and technical excellence, where your contributions directly impact revenue-critical systems used worldwide.