Sr. Software Engineer (PHP)

Higher Logic is an industry-leading engagement platform that delivers powerful online communities and communication tools. They are seeking a Senior Software Developer (Backend / PHP) to build and evolve core application systems for community experiences, focusing on backend development and AI-assisted workflows.

Responsibilities:

• Build, maintain, and ship high-quality product features in a multidisciplinary Agile team
• Design and evolve backend systems that support large-scale, highly configurable community applications
• Work across core application layers, APIs, integrations, and platform capabilities to deliver reliable end-to-end solutions
• Write reliable, well-tested code; participate in code review; mentor teammates through thoughtful feedback and shared patterns
• Triage, debug, and resolve production issues efficiently; collaborate closely with product, QA, support, and other engineers to close the loop quickly
• Contribute to application performance, scalability, resilience, and maintainability across a large and evolving codebase
• Help shape technical direction by improving architecture, coding standards, tooling, documentation, and team development practices
• Participate in guild or cross-team engineering discussions to strengthen backend practices and promote sustainable patterns across the organization
• Use AI-powered IDEs and assistants (e.g., Cursor, Copilot-style tools) to accelerate implementation, refactoring, debugging, and test generation—while ensuring correctness, security, and maintainability
• Apply AI thoughtfully: write strong prompts, verify outputs, and incorporate guardrails such as automated tests, static analysis, code review, and runtime validation
• Help define best practices for AI-assisted engineering, including where automation is most effective, what requires human review, and how to evaluate output quality in a production environment
• Partner on AI-enabled product and platform initiatives where relevant, including areas like moderation tooling, content workflows, search and discovery, summarization, admin productivity, and internal developer efficiency

Requirements:

• Strong understanding of Agile values and principles
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including object-oriented design, modular architecture, and maintainable coding practices
• Experience building and supporting production applications at scale, with attention to performance, reliability, and long-term maintainability
• Experience designing and working with APIs and service boundaries in complex systems
• Ability to debug effectively, reason through production issues, and make sound tradeoffs in a large application environment
• Awareness of security best practices and experience identifying or addressing vulnerabilities in web applications
• Comfort working in containerized or modern local development environments and with contemporary engineering workflows
• Comfort with Git-based workflows, pull requests, and collaborative code review
• Practical experience using AI coding tools (Cursor or equivalent) in day-to-day development, including validating generated code and avoiding insecure or low-quality patterns
• 5+ years of professional software development experience building and maintaining production web applications
• Experience working in a large, mature application or platform with significant business logic, legacy considerations, and evolving architecture
• Experience with extensible or modular systems such as themes, plugins, integrations, or configurable platform features
• Experience working with asynchronous processing, background jobs, queues, or event-driven patterns
• Familiarity with database-backed applications and the performance considerations that come with them
• Experience with testing practices and tools that build confidence through automation
• Strong product instincts: you communicate tradeoffs well, care about user outcomes, and understand how technical decisions affect the customer experience
• Experience contributing to technical mentoring, architectural improvements, or shared engineering standards