Staff Software Engineer - PHP Backend

ServiceTrade is a best-in-class field service management platform that helps commercial fire protection and mechanical service contractors build efficient and growing businesses. They are seeking a Staff Engineer to lead architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and modernize their complex PHP backend platform while ensuring reliability and scalability for their customers.

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