Senior Backend Engineer (Laravel)

About the role

We're a digital healthcare company building the platform that powers our clinical and pharmacy operations. We're expanding that platform significantly this year, and we're looking for a senior backend engineer to help design and build its next generation.

You'll take ownership of backend services from initial architecture through deployment and long-term maintenance. You'll design scalable systems, implement new features, review code, improve application performance, and continuously reduce technical debt.

You'll regularly switch between multiple products and projects, helping teams deliver features quickly without compromising quality or maintainability. Beyond writing code, you'll participate in architecture discussions, mentor developers, review pull requests, and help shape the engineering standards followed across the company.

As AI continues to play an increasingly important role in our products, you'll also help build intelligent workflows, integrate AI services, and explore new ways of using modern language models to improve customer experiences and internal operations.

What you'll be doing

• Designing and building backend services in Laravel, from architecture through to production
• Working on core platform capabilities: data modelling, APIs, background processing, and integrations
• Designing secure, well-documented, versioned REST APIs
• Building event-driven and asynchronous systems with queues and background jobs
• Optimising database performance and application scalability
• Writing automated tests and helping improve our engineering and release practices
• Integrating third-party services, including commerce, logistics, and AI/LLM APIs
• Reviewing code and helping raise the overall standard of the team

Requirements

What we're looking for

• 7+ years of professional backend development, with at least 3 years of strong Laravel experience in production systems you helped design - we care more about what you've built than the exact number of years
• Deep understanding of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), SOLID principles, design patterns, and system design
• Strong data modelling and system design instincts, and the ability to reason about trade-offs
• Experience with Shopify APIs, Eloquent ORM optimisation, MySQL performance tuning, Redis, queue-based systems, AWS infrastructure, and scalable REST APIs is essential
• Solid MySQL depth (indexing, query optimisation, performance under growth), plus Redis and queue-based asynchronous processing
• Experience with AWS, Docker, Linux, Git, CI/CD, application monitoring, and performance optimization is essential
• Testing as a habit, you write tests, you expect CI to catch problems, and you take reliability seriously
• Working knowledge of AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch), enough to be self-sufficient
• Clear written communication and the ability to document and defend design decisions

Nice to have

• Experience in a regulated domain (healthcare, fintech, or similar) where compliance and auditability are design inputs
• Multi-tenant SaaS experience
• LLM integration work (Anthropic or OpenAI APIs), with an interest in evaluation and reliability rather than demos
• Shopify API experience
• Event-driven architecture in production

Tech stack

PHP 8.x / Laravel (Horizon, Queues, Events, Scheduler) · MySQL · Redis · REST APIs · AWS · Docker · GitHub Actions · Anthropic & OpenAI APIs · Vue.js + Inertia on the frontend (this is a backend-focused role; frontend fluency is welcome but not required)

The challenges you'll be working on

As part of our engineering team, you'll work on a variety of technical challenges, including:

• Designing backend systems capable of handling millions of requests.
• Building AI-powered products and integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into real-world workflows.
• Architecting and developing greenfield applications from concept to production.
• Scaling and optimising large Laravel codebases.
• Designing secure, maintainable, and high-performance REST APIs.
• Building event-driven and asynchronous systems using queues and background processing.
• Optimising database performance, caching strategies, and application scalability.
• Improving developer experience through automation, tooling, and engineering best practices.
• Building reliable cloud-native applications on AWS.

Benefits

We're an equal-opportunity employer. As a regulated healthcare business, the successful candidate will undergo a basic background check.