Senior Software Development Engineer - PHP/Laravel
First seen by Alion on Oct 23, 2026.
What we need:
- PHP and Laravel: 7+ years of PHP and 4+ years on Laravel in production. Comfortable with modern PHP 8.x: typed properties, enums, readonly classes and constructor promotion.
- Partner-facing APIs: You've built REST APIs that outside developers integrate against, with OAuth2 or API-key auth (Laravel Passport), versioning, rate limits, consistent error envelopes and idempotent writes.
- Queues on Amazon SQS: Standard and FIFO queues, dead-letter queues, visibility timeouts, retries with backoff, and jobs that are safe to run twice. Horizon/Redis experience counts, but you should know where SQS behaves differently.
- MySQL at scale: Reading EXPLAIN, composite and covering indexes, recursive CTEs, and zero-downtime migrations on large live tables (millions of rows).
- Read replicas: Read/write splitting in Laravel, sticky connections and handling replica lag.
- Webhooks in both directions: Receiving signed webhooks (HMAC verification, replay safety, fast acknowledge then queue) and sending them to partners with retries.
- Multi-tenancy: Modelling hierarchical tenants (partner - brand - location - store). Tenant scoping on every query and permission check is a habit, not an afterthought.
- Testing: You write tests (Pest or PHPUnit) without being asked, including failure modes, cross-tenant access and duplicate submissions.
- Git: Feature branches, small reviewable PRs, cherry-picking onto release branches, resolving merge conflicts and keeping a clean history.
- Communication: Clear written English. You'll read specs, push back on wrong ones, and write API docs (OpenAPI/Swagger) and Postman collections.
- Time zone: At least 3 to 4 hours of overlap with US Pacific time.
Nice to have:
- AWS hands-on: ECS Fargate, RDS (MySQL, read replicas, RDS Proxy), ElastiCache Redis, S3, SQS, CloudFront, WAF and CloudWatch. You care what it costs and have right-sized something.
- Infrastructure and delivery: Infrastructure as code with CloudFormation (or Terraform), and CI/CD with AWS CodePipeline / CodeBuild, Docker images and rolling deploys.
- Scaling: ALB target groups and health checks, autoscaling on CPU and queue depth, and separating workloads into isolated worker lanes.
- Production debugging: Reading CloudWatch logs, finding queue backlogs and stuck jobs, and running safe diagnostics on a live database.
- LLMs in production: AI-generated responses, cost and token tracking, and rate limits.
- Third-party platforms: Google Business Profile API, Facebook Graph API, or similar review and listing sources.
- Python neighbours: Experience working next to Python services or data pipelines.
- Security: Habits that hold up in a SOC 2 environment: audit logging, secrets management, least-privilege IAM and no PII in logs. We're working toward ours now.
- Billing: Stripe metered billing, including usage-based and plan-based models with proration.
- Frontend reach: Enough React / Next.js to read and adjust the frontend that consumes your API.
- AI coding tools: Using assistants such as Claude Code responsibly: reviewing every change and keeping tests green.
Skills
Full Stack, PHP, Laravel, MySQL, RESTful API, AWS, Git, Redis