Staff Software Engineer - PHP Backend

ServiceTrade empowers commercial service contractors to service smarter and scale faster. The Staff Engineer will lead architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and drive modernization efforts of the PHP backend platform while ensuring production stability.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve the architecture of our core backend platform: a large PHP/Doctrine monolith with event-driven async processing and CQRS read models, and a growing number of Node microservices
• Drive technical strategy for database sharding, read-replica routing, multi-tenant isolation, and schema migration across MySQL shards
• Lead incremental modernization efforts, including migrating frameworks, extracting services, and adopting modern PHP patterns, while maintaining production stability and velocity
• Design and improve our event pipeline: domain events, SQS-based async processing, MongoDB projections, and worker infrastructure
• Make and document architectural decisions, weighing trade-offs and building consensus across the team
• Design, build, and maintain scalable RESTful APIs and backend services in PHP
• Own query performance across sharded MySQL databases: analyze execution plans, design indexing strategies, identify and eliminate slow queries, and optimize Doctrine ORM/DBAL usage to prevent N+1s and unnecessary hydration
• Lead schema design and migration strategy across shards, balancing normalization, query performance, and operational safety
• Write and optimize complex queries across sharded MySQL databases using Doctrine ORM/DBAL
• Build and operate MongoDB document models and projections via Doctrine ODM
• Architect message-driven workflows: SQS producers/consumers, long-polling workers, idempotency, DLQ/redrive strategies, deduplication, and visibility-timeout tuning
• Implement and improve caching strategies across APCu, Redis, and query-level caches, including stampede protection
• Integrate with third-party systems (accounting platforms, identity providers, search infrastructure)
• Own and improve GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines, covering build, test, and packaging stages with matrix strategies and artifact caching
• Manage and optimize Docker-based development and CI environments (multi-service Compose stacks, LocalStack for AWS mocking, ephemeral database strategies)
• Partner with SRE on QA server provisioning, production infrastructure, deployment processes, and observability, contributing CloudFormation changes and monitoring improvements as needed
• Champion environment parity between development, CI, QA, and production
• Ensure new features have appropriate application-level observability and work with SRE to surface metrics, dashboards, and alerts
• A believer and practitioner in the use of the latest AI tools and concepts to achieve maximum productivity
• Collaborate with our Principal AI Engineer to champion an 'AI-first' engineering culture, providing the guidance and best practices necessary for the team to use AI as a force multiplier in their daily delivery and modernization efforts
• Using AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar LLM-based assistants to accelerate code comprehension, refactoring, and the modernization of legacy systems
• Ensure proper attention to security, performance, and trustworthiness of AI features
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, pairing, and architectural guidance
• Raise the bar on code quality, testing practices, and operational readiness Identify systemic issues (tech debt, reliability gaps, developer experience friction) and drive solutions
• Collaborate with product managers, frontend engineers, QA, and devops to shape the technical approach for major initiatives

Requirements:

• 8+ years of professional software development experience with deep expertise in backend PHP
• Proven track record operating and evolving large, long-lived PHP codebases in production. You've modernized systems, not just built greenfield
• Expert-level MySQL knowledge: you can read and tune execution plans, design indexing strategies for complex access patterns, reason about locking behavior, and optimize queries across replicated and sharded databases
• Demonstrated experience using tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar LLM-based assistants to accelerate code comprehension, refactoring, and the modernization of legacy systems
• Mastery of automated testing best practices (TDD, contract testing, spec-oriented testing, and CI/CD integration) using PHPUnit and Jest; a history of coaching teams on how to balance test coverage with developer velocity while maintaining a 'zero-regression' mindset
• Deep experience with Doctrine ORM and ODM (entity mapping, repositories, query builder, hydration strategies, proxy generation, N+1 prevention, lazy/eager loading trade-offs)
• Strong production experience with MongoDB (document modeling, aggregation pipelines, ODM tooling)
• Extensive hands-on experience with AWS: CloudFormation/Terraform, EC2, RDS, S3, SQS, SES, Lambda, ElastiCache, VPC networking, IAM policies
• Strong experience designing and operating asynchronous processing systems (SQS or equivalent), including worker supervision, DLQ strategies, idempotency, backoff/jitter, and visibility-timeout management
• Production experience with Redis for caching, session management, and distributed locking
• Strong Docker and Docker Compose skills for development, CI, and packaging workflows
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions preferred)
• Working knowledge of AWS services (EC2, RDS, S3, SQS, SES, Lambda, ElastiCache, VPC networking) sufficient to troubleshoot, contribute infrastructure-as-code changes, and collaborate effectively with SRE
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives, make architectural trade-offs, and influence without authority
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; comfortable producing technical documentation and RFCs
• Experience modernizing large PHP monoliths: incrementally migrating frameworks, extracting services, or evolving architecture while maintaining production stability
• Experience with CQRS and event-sourcing patterns
• Familiarity with Typesense, Elasticsearch, or similar search infrastructure
• Experience with Auth0 or other identity/SSO platforms and patterns
• Experience with configuration management (Puppet, Ansible) or infrastructure automation
• Familiarity with Kinesis, CloudWatch, or other AWS observability tooling
• Experience with static analysis tools (Psalm) and automated refactoring (Rector)
• Familiarity with frontend frameworks (React, Ember.js), enough to collaborate effectively with frontend engineers
• Experience with serverless patterns (AWS Lambda, SAM)
• Background in multi-tenant SaaS architecture and data isolation strategies