Senior Backend Engineer

Role Overview

The Senior Backend Engineer will work primarily within a mature, actively developed Laravel codebase and own backend features from initial requirements and database changes through development, deployment, and production monitoring.

A major focus of this role will be building and maintaining reliable integrations with external platforms, including systems that may provide inconsistent, duplicated, delayed, or unreliable data. The Senior Backend Engineer will design resilient ingestion and asynchronous processing workflows while troubleshooting complex production and data issues across multiple systems.

This is a deeply backend-focused position for an experienced PHP/Laravel engineer with strong database fundamentals, third-party API experience, practical AWS knowledge, and excellent production debugging skills. The ideal candidate also actively uses AI-assisted coding tools while maintaining the independent engineering judgment necessary to validate, debug, and take ownership of everything they ship.

Key Responsibilities

Backend Engineering & Feature Ownership

• Own backend features end to end, including requirements, schema changes, development, deployment, and production monitoring.
• Develop and maintain backend functionality within a mature PHP/Laravel application.
• Design solutions that remain reliable and scalable across a high-volume, multi-tenant SaaS environment.
• Take ownership of technical outcomes rather than focusing solely on framework-level implementation.
• Identify recurring technical issues and proactively recommend improvements to platform architecture, reliability, and performance.

Third-Party Integrations & Data Processing

• Build and maintain integrations with third-party platforms and services.
• Develop webhook receivers, polling jobs, and parsers that ingest and normalize external data.
• Design integrations capable of handling inconsistent, unreliable, duplicated, delayed, and out-of-order vendor data.
• Build resilient ingestion processes that maintain data accuracy as integration volume increases.
• Develop and consume REST APIs and work with external services across multiple industries and use cases.
• Support high-volume transactional messaging and customer feedback workflows.

Asynchronous Processing & Queues

• Design and maintain asynchronous and queue-based workflows using technologies such as AWS SQS.
• Implement appropriate retry, idempotency, duplicate-handling, timeout, and failure-management strategies.
• Manage dead-letter queues and troubleshoot failed background processing.
• Design systems that remain reliable when external services or asynchronous processes behave unexpectedly.
• Support webhook ingestion and background processing at scale.

Database Architecture & Performance

• Design and maintain relational database schemas that support high-volume production workloads.
• Develop appropriate indexing strategies and optimize database queries.
• Use query analysis and EXPLAIN to identify and resolve database performance issues.
• Identify inefficient queries, N+1 problems, and other sources of performance degradation.
• Work with large production datasets across MySQL/AWS Aurora and MongoDB/DocumentDB environments.
• Maintain strong data integrity and performance across multi-tenant applications.

Production Debugging & Reliability

• Investigate complex production and data issues across multiple systems.
• Trace information across MySQL, MongoDB, S3 archives, CloudWatch logs, Sentry, and other production resources.
• Diagnose system failures using logs, traces, error-monitoring platforms, and database analysis.
• Identify root causes rather than only addressing immediate symptoms.
• Monitor deployed features and ensure production systems remain reliable after release.

Testing & Code Quality

• Write automated tests as part of the development process.
• Determine appropriate testing coverage based on system behavior, risk, and business requirements.
• Review other engineers' code and provide meaningful technical feedback.
• Participate in Git and pull-request-based development workflows.
• Maintain high engineering standards across production code, integrations, database changes, and tests.
• Use Docker-based development environments effectively.

AI-Assisted Development

• Use AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar tools as part of day-to-day production development.
• Leverage AI tools to improve development efficiency while maintaining independent engineering judgment.
• Review, validate, and improve AI-generated code before shipping it to production.
• Identify incorrect, misleading, or unsafe AI-generated solutions and implement appropriate corrections.
• Critically evaluate AI-generated tests rather than assuming generated coverage or assertions are correct.
• Independently debug and reason through complex systems without depending on AI.
• Determine when AI-assisted development is beneficial and when direct engineering is faster, safer, or more appropriate.
• Maintain a complete understanding of all code shipped to production regardless of whether AI contributed to its creation.

Qualifications

Experience

• 5+ years of professional backend development experience.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with PHP and a modern PHP framework, with Laravel strongly preferred and Symfony also considered.
• Experience developing and maintaining production backend systems.
• Experience building and consuming REST APIs and integrating third-party services.
• Experience working with queues, background jobs, retries, failures, duplicate delivery, and timeouts.
• Experience building systems around inconsistent or unreliable third-party data.
• Experience working with Git and pull-request-based development workflows.
• Experience using Docker for local development.
• Experience using AI coding assistants on real production software.

Skills

• Deep knowledge of modern PHP 8.x, object-oriented programming, and software design principles.
• Strong Laravel expertise with the ability to work effectively within a mature and actively developed codebase.
• Excellent relational database skills, including schema design, indexing, query optimization, EXPLAIN analysis, and diagnosing performance degradation.
• Strong understanding of asynchronous processing and the engineering considerations required for reliable queue-based systems.
• Able to design resilient third-party integrations that account for retries, idempotency, duplicate delivery, failures, and inconsistent data.
• Strong production debugging abilities with experience tracing complex issues through databases, logs, monitoring systems, and external integrations.
• Strong automated testing judgment with the ability to determine what should be tested and evaluate whether tests accurately validate expected behavior.
• Comfortable working with AWS infrastructure, particularly SQS, Lambda, ECS, S3, CloudWatch, and RDS/Aurora.
• Familiarity with MongoDB or DocumentDB alongside relational database systems is strongly preferred.
• Able to work effectively within multi-tenant SaaS architectures, including tenant isolation and white-label environments.
• Comfortable working with high-volume transactional systems, webhook ingestion, SMS, email, or similar messaging workflows.
• Strong written communication skills for tickets, pull requests, technical documentation, and production investigation write-ups.
• Experienced with AI-assisted development while maintaining the independent technical judgment required to validate and take ownership of production code.

Technical Environment

The platform's core backend environment includes PHP 8.4, Laravel 12, MySQL/AWS Aurora, Pest, PHPUnit, Redis, and Laravel Pint.

Infrastructure includes AWS, SQS, AWS Lambda/Bref, ECS Fargate, S3, CloudFront, Docker, Nginx, AWS CodePipeline, and Terraform. Data and observability systems include MongoDB/DocumentDB, CloudWatch, and Sentry.

The platform integrates with numerous external systems across messaging, payments, AI, restaurant technology, reservation systems, automotive technology, and wellness platforms. The wider platform also includes Next.js customer-facing applications and a Node.js realtime layer, although ownership of these systems is not a primary responsibility of this role.

Preferred Experience

• Experience running serverless PHP applications using Bref or comparable technologies.
• Experience with webhook ingestion at scale, including idempotency, replay, duplicate delivery, and out-of-order events.
• Experience configuring Nginx and working within pipeline-based deployment environments.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience using Terraform.
• Experience with WebSockets or realtime systems.
• Working knowledge of Node.js and TypeScript.
• Experience within hospitality technology, restaurant technology, POS systems, or reservation platforms.
• Experience with Pest.
• Experience using static-analysis tools such as PHPStan or Larastan.

What Success Looks Like

• Backend features are independently owned from requirements through production monitoring.
• Third-party integrations remain reliable despite inconsistent or unpredictable external data.
• High-volume asynchronous workflows process data accurately and recover appropriately from failures.
• Database queries and schemas remain performant as platform data and transaction volume increase.
• Complex production issues are investigated methodically and resolved at their root cause.
• Automated tests provide meaningful protection against regressions and production issues.
• Code reviews contribute to stronger engineering quality across the team.
• AI-assisted development improves engineering velocity without compromising code quality or independent technical judgment.
• The platform remains reliable and scalable as its multi-tenant customer base, integrations, and data volumes continue to grow.