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5+ years of professional backend development experience.
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3+ years of hands-on experience with PHP and a modern PHP framework, with Laravel strongly preferred and Symfony also considered.
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Experience developing and maintaining production backend systems.
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Experience building and consuming REST APIs and integrating third-party services.
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Experience working with queues, background jobs, retries, failures, duplicate delivery, and timeouts.
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Experience building systems around inconsistent or unreliable third-party data.
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Experience working with Git and pull-request-based development workflows.
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Experience using Docker for local development.
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Experience using AI coding assistants on real production software.
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Senior-level debugging, architecture, and system design ability.
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Deep knowledge of modern PHP 8.x, object-oriented programming, and software design principles.
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Strong Laravel expertise with the ability to work effectively within a mature and actively developed codebase.
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Excellent relational database skills, including schema design, indexing, query optimization, analysis, and diagnosing performance degradation.
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Strong understanding of asynchronous processing and the engineering considerations required for reliable queue-based systems.
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Able to design resilient third-party integrations that account for retries, idempotency, duplicate delivery, failures, and inconsistent data.
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Strong production debugging abilities with experience tracing complex issues through databases, logs, monitoring systems, and external integrations.
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Strong automated testing judgment with the ability to determine what should be tested and evaluate whether tests accurately validate expected behavior.
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Comfortable working with AWS infrastructure, particularly SQS, Lambda, ECS, S3, CloudWatch, and RDS/Aurora.
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Familiarity with MongoDB or DocumentDB alongside relational database systems is strongly preferred.
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Able to work effectively within multi-tenant SaaS architectures, including tenant isolation and white-label environments.
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Comfortable working with high-volume transactional systems, webhook ingestion, SMS, email, or similar messaging workflows.
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Strong written communication skills for tickets, pull requests, technical documentation, and production investigation write-ups.
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Experienced with AI-assisted development while maintaining the independent technical judgment required to validate and take ownership of production code.
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Both Laravel/framework knowledge and strong backend/database fundamentals are required.
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.