Sr. PHP Symfony Engineer (Remote, Full-Time) [AR024]

About Smart Working

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Our mission is simple: to break down geographic barriers and connect skilled professionals with outstanding global teams and products for full-time, long-term roles. We help you discover meaningful work with teams that invest in your success, where you’re empowered to grow personally and professionally.

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Applicants must have the right to work in the country they are applying from and be able to work without employer sponsorship.

About the Role

As a Senior PHP/Symfony Engineer, you will take hands-on ownership of backend development within a mature Symfony platform that manages marketing and revenue data for enterprise customers. The core application currently runs on Symfony 6.1, with an upgrade to Symfony 7 planned, alongside an Angular front end and TypeScript and Python AI agent microservices.

This is a strongly backend-weighted, senior hands-on engineering role requiring an architect mindset, strong independence and the ability to understand how technical decisions affect the wider system. You will work within a remote, cross-functional product squad alongside engineering, product, QA and DevOps colleagues.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of backend development within the core Symfony application, becoming fully independent in delivering work within 2-3 months of joining.
• Review and critically assess code written by the team and AI tools, challenging proposed approaches and making sure key considerations have been properly addressed.
• Support the migration from Symfony 6.1 to Symfony 7 by resolving versioning, compatibility and legacy issues currently preventing the upgrade.
• Improve the application’s performance, scalability and maintainability, making it easier and safer to introduce new functionality.
• Work across the Angular front end, TypeScript and Python-based AI agent services, collaborating with DevOps where backend changes impact other areas of the system.
• Be comfortable reading and understanding the Angular/TypeScript codebase, even though the role is primarily backend focused. Strong front-end development experience is not required.
• Understand the wider impact of technical decisions across Symfony, Angular and AI services, while spotting gaps or issues in both human-written and AI-generated code.
• Question existing approaches, identify root causes and look for better ways of building things rather than simply completing assigned tickets.
• Deliver thoughtful, maintainable solutions within a legacy codebase while maintaining a consistent pace of delivery.
• Work with a high level of autonomy and ownership while collaborating effectively with a remote, cross-functional team.
• Follow SOC 2, PII and security requirements consistently and without exception.

Requirements

• 8+ years of commercial software engineering experience, including at least 5 years working with PHP.
• 7+ years of Expert-level PHP development experience.
• 3+ years of recent commercial experience with Symfony 6.x/7 at Advanced level. Strong senior-level Laravel experience may be considered where the experience is clearly transferable and the candidate has a good understanding of the differences between Laravel and Symfony.
• 4+ years of Advanced experience in backend architecture, system design and scalability.
• 2+ years of Advanced experience using AI development tools critically, including reviewing, validating and challenging AI-generated code rather than accepting it without question.
• 5+ years of Advanced MySQL experience, including database schema design and query optimisation. Equivalent depth of experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database may also be considered.
• At least 1 year of experience working with or understanding Angular/TypeScript. Experience with React or Vue using TypeScript may also be considered, but some front-end exposure is essential.
• 3+ years of Advanced experience with automated testing using PHPUnit. Experience with Pest or another equivalent PHP testing framework may also be considered.
• At least 1 year of Intermediate experience working on framework upgrades and modernising legacy codebases. Experience with major-version upgrades or significant refactoring in other large PHP applications may be considered.
• 2+ years of Intermediate AWS experience. Equivalent experience with Azure or GCP may also be considered.
• Fluent written and spoken English.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to work effectively in a remote environment.
• Ability to work UK hours.
• Ability to successfully complete strict background checks and adhere to PII and data protection requirements.
• Strong self-sufficiency, with the ability to operate independently and without handholding after 2-3 months, while continuing to collaborate effectively with the wider team.
• A hands-on engineering approach combined with an architectural mindset, with the ability to understand how and why the wider system works rather than focusing only on writing code.

Nice to Have

• 2+ years of Intermediate CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions; GitLab CI, Jenkins or Azure DevOps are suitable alternatives.
• Basic experience with Amazon Redshift or data warehousing; Snowflake or BigQuery may be considered.
• Azure exposure alongside AWS.
• Previous project leadership experience.
• Previous mentoring and technical leadership experience with other engineers.