Senior PHP Developer

Job Description

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Senior PHP Developer to join our team and take ownership of critical components of a large-scale, high-load platform processing tens of thousands of requests per second and terabytes of data daily.

Our core product is a powerful enterprise monolith with a modular architecture. As the business continues to grow, we focus on maintaining exceptional reliability, performance, and scalability while continuously evolving the platform.

You will work alongside a team of senior-level engineers, contributing to architectural decisions, optimizing distributed processes, and driving engineering excellence across the organization.

What You'll Do

Core Platform Development

• Design, develop, and optimize key modules of a high-performance PHP platform.
• Ensure reliability, maintainability, and scalability of the codebase.
• Take technical ownership of critical business domains and services.

Architecture & System Design

• Participate in architectural decision-making for a large enterprise monolith.
• Design integration patterns with databases and external systems.
• Improve modularity and maintain clear boundaries between platform components.

Data Layer Optimization

• Design efficient data models and storage strategies.
• Optimize MySQL queries and ORM performance under heavy production workloads.
• Work with large datasets and contribute to analytical solutions using ClickHouse.

Event-Driven Architecture

• Design and maintain asynchronous processing solutions using Apache Kafka.
• Build reliable integrations between internal services and external systems.

Observability & Reliability

• Integrate telemetry into applications using OpenTelemetry-based solutions.
• Analyze application performance and identify bottlenecks.
• Troubleshoot and resolve production incidents.
• Contribute to monitoring, logging, and tracing practices.

Engineering Excellence

• Conduct meaningful code reviews and mentor fellow engineers.
• Promote high development standards and best practices.
• Collaborate closely with Product Managers, QA Engineers, DevOps, and other stakeholders.

Requirements

- 5+ years of commercial PHP development experience.

- Strong knowledge of PHP 8.x and modern backend development practices.

- Deep understanding of OOP, SOLID principles, design patterns, and clean architecture.

- Experience building and maintaining large-scale backend systems.

Technical Skills

• Strong experience with Symfony and/or Laravel.
• Advanced knowledge of MySQL, including:
• Query optimization
• Indexing strategies
• Replication
• Locking mechanisms
• High-volume data processing
• Experience with Redis.
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka.
• Understanding of observability, logging, and application profiling.
• Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience working in CI/CD environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience with ClickHouse at scale.
• Experience building analytics or data lake solutions.
• Experience refactoring large monolithic applications into modular domains.
• Knowledge of OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing.

Soft Skills

• Strong ownership mindset and accountability.
• Ability to work independently and make technical decisions.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate with senior engineers and cross-functional teams.

Tech Stack

• PHP 8.x
• Symfony / Laravel
• MySQL
• Redis
• Apache Kafka
• ClickHouse
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• OpenTelemetry

What We Offer

• Opportunity to work on a high-load platform handling massive volumes of traffic and data.
• A team composed of senior-level engineers.
• High level of technical ownership and impact.
• Remote-first environment with flexibility across Europe.
• Hybrid and on-site opportunities in Prague, Czech Republic.
• Long-term collaboration on challenging engineering problems.

Benefits

• 20 vacation days and 5 family days yearly
• Flexible start to the workday
• Support from a professional corporate coach and psychologist
• Regular internal and external activities, workshops, trips, and corporate events
• Access to our internal knowledge base, meetups, and team-building activities
• Ongoing training in new technologies and continuous professional development support