PHP Developer (Laravel & Symfony)

About this role

This role is open to candidates based in LATAM, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Please note that as this role supports U.S.-based clients, candidates must be available to work during U.S. business hours aligned with the client’s time zone.   CLIENT OVERVIEW Our client operates a multi-tenant feedback and reputation management platform serving businesses across restaurant, automotive, fitness, wellness, and hospitality industries. The platform enables organizations to collect and manage customer feedback through SMS, email, and live dashboards while connecting with dozens of third-party POS, dealer management, reservation, and business systems. As the platform continues to operate at significant scale across thousands of business locations, they are seeking a PHP Developer to strengthen backend architecture, integrations, data processing, performance, and production reliability. ROLE OVERVIEW The PHP Developer 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. LOCATION Fully Remote | 7:30 AM - 3:30 PM CT (with no lunch break) or 7:30 AM – 4:30 PM CT with a 1-hour lunch 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. - Ind