Senior Backend Engineer (Shopify Ecosystem)

The role involves taking full ownership of a critical backend ecosystem powering financial aid, campus card balances, and textbook rentals across approximately 1,200 university bookstores on Shopify. The platform handles thousands of orders and webhooks daily, with real money moving through the system.

What You’ll Own

• Own the charge pipeline end-to-end, including coverage, tax, shipping, refunds, multi-fulfillment, and mixed tender payments.
• Diagnose production orders across five services and identify the service responsible for each issue.
• Perform daily triage of reconciliation reports and route failures to the appropriate team.
• Own scheduled jobs, sweeps, and recovery commands that run unattended.
• Manage delivery end-to-end, including branching, PRs, QA promotion, GitHub Actions deployments to Azure, and QA steps.
• Create a regression test for every bug fix.

Requirements

Must-Have Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional PHP experience, including at least 3 years of Laravel in production.
• Strong experience with asynchronous systems, including idempotency, retries, dead letter queues, locks, and scheduled jobs.
• Strong SQL skills at the query-plan level, preferably with SQL Server.
• Solid cloud experience, ideally with Azure, including reading logs, running queries, monitoring metrics, and supporting deployments.
• Experience integrating with complex external systems and APIs, including technologies such as SOAP, XML, SFTP, or similar.
• Strong judgment when working with financial transactions, including knowing when not to execute a transaction and using dry runs when appropriate.
• Strong testing practices and experience treating automated tests as part of the development process.
• Ability to take ownership of production systems and troubleshoot issues independently.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Shopify Admin API, webhooks, metafields, gift cards, or checkout and POS extensions.
• TypeScript and Node.js, particularly Remix or NestJS.
• Prisma and BullMQ.
• Experience in fintech, billing, payments, or accounting reconciliation.
• Experience with Playwright or other end-to-end testing frameworks.
• Experience working with stateful, high-volume systems.

Technology Stack

Backend: PHP 8.4, Laravel 11/12, domain-layered architecture, Pest/PHPUnit, PHPStan

Data: SQL Server on Azure SQL Managed Instance

Async: Laravel queues on Redis, dead letter handling, locks, BullMQ on Node services

Cloud: Azure Container Apps, Log Analytics (KQL), Key Vault, Application Insights, GitHub Actions

Shopify: Admin GraphQL, HMAC-verified webhooks, metafields, fulfillment orders, gift cards, checkout and POS UI extensions, Functions

Integrations: SOAP for payments and rentals, Vertex for tax, SFTP for settlement files

Sibling Services: TypeScript, Remix, NestJS, Prisma, BullMQ