Senior Software Engineer PHP

Kforce is a recruiting company seeking a Senior Software Engineer PHP based in West Palm Beach, Florida. The role involves designing, developing, and maintaining high-performance PHP applications, optimizing MySQL database schemas, and implementing RESTful APIs, among other responsibilities.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance PHP applications serving millions of API requests daily
• Architect and optimize MySQL database schemas, queries, and indexing strategies for low-latency access
• Implement and maintain RESTful APIs following modern API design standards, including OpenAPI specifications and versioning best practices
• Design and implement asynchronous workflows, background jobs, queues, and event-driven integrations where appropriate
• Participate in architecture discussions, incident response, and root-cause analysis for production issues
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to define technical requirements and deliver scalable solutions
• Conduct code reviews, mentor junior engineers, and champion engineering best practices
• Write clean, well-tested code with comprehensive unit and integration test coverage

Requirements:

• 5+ years of professional software development experience with strong proficiency in modern PHP (PHP 8+) and common frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony, or Slim
• Deep expertise in MySQL including query optimization and schema design for high-traffic applications
• Strong experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs using modern standards
• Experience with Redis for caching, distributed locking, queues, and performance optimization
• Familiarity with message queues and asynchronous processing systems such as RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, or Redis Streams
• Proficiency with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience with logging, monitoring, tracing, and observability tooling (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, etc.)
• Understanding of API security best practices including OAuth2, JWT, RBAC, rate limiting, and OWASP principles
• Experience with cloud infrastructure platforms (Vultr, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure) and infrastructure-as-code tooling
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and Git-based development workflows
• Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively across distributed teams