Senior PHP Developer (Ironwall)

Job Description

Join the Incogni engineering team to help us scale Ironwall, our specialized protection service safeguarding the online privacy and personal data of vulnerable individuals and public servants. We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who thinks in distributed systems, designs for resilience, and takes complete ownership of high-impact technical initiatives.

Our mission is to build a scalable, secure, and resilient platform that supports rapid product growth. You will design core application services, eliminate architectural bottlenecks, and help evolve our tech stack across backend ecosystems.

• Partner closely with product managers and stakeholders to analyze business requirements and translate them into clear, scalable technical solution proposals.
• Architect, build, and maintain high-traffic, business-critical backend services with a strong focus on reliability, low latency, and data security.
• Leverage modern AI developer tooling (e.g., coding assistants, LLM-driven refactoring, automated testing agents) to maximize delivery velocity and streamline technical workflows.
• Lead technical decision-making across service boundaries, domain modeling, data persistence, and deployment pipelines.
• Identify performance bottlenecks, optimize database queries, and design robust distributed workflows.
• Drive engineering excellence by conducting high-standard code reviews, establishing testing practices, and mentoring other engineers.
• Own initiatives end-to-end: from initial technical RFCs and system design to deployment, observability, and post-launch stability.

Requirements

• Senior-level backend expertise: Extensive experience building, scaling, and maintaining production applications using PHP (modern 8.x) and familiarity or willingness to work with languages like Go or Node.js/TypeScript.
• System & API Design: Proven track record designing scalable RESTful APIs, clean domain models, and microservice/modular architectures.
• Data Management: Strong hands-on experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) including indexing, schema optimization, and caching strategies (e.g., Redis).
• Engineering Ownership: Demonstrated ability to drive projects from concept to deployment, making sound trade-offs between speed, scalability, and technical debt.
• Culture of Quality: Mastery of automated testing (unit, integration, end-to-end), CI/CD pipelines, and writing maintainable, well-documented code.

Nice to have

• Experience scaling platforms handling millions of high-concurrency requests or large-scale automated data removal pipelines.
• Deep understanding of observability practices (distributed tracing, structured logging, Prometheus/Grafana).
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes).

Company offers

• Growth and learning opportunities: time dedicated to learning, conferences, online learning platforms, and books for your professional development;
• Health and wellness: we want you to feel and be your best. That's why we offer various benefits, from online workouts, a physical coach and a gym to regular mental health checks;
• Tools of your choice: choose technical equipment and the tools you need to do your best;
• Community and celebrations: get ready for long-lasting traditions such as yearly workation, Friday get-togethers, various team buildings and company celebrations;
• Convenient commuting: traveling from point A to point B can be a pain. That’s why, depending on your unique circumstances, we compensate part of your public transport costs;
• Work-life balance: We encourage working in the office, with the possibility of up to two remote days per week. Plus, with our WFA policy, you can work from almost anywhere in the world;
• Premium Surfshark accounts: for you, your family, and friends;