Senior PHP Full-Stack Developer

About the Role

Our client is a well-established US-based B2B SaaS company providing software that supports the day-to-day operations of schools, including enrollment, records, communication, billing, and compliance reporting.

You'll join a small, senior engineering team and play a key role in improving and evolving a mature platform used by thousands of people every school day.

This is a role for an engineer who enjoys ownership, solving real technical problems, and making meaningful improvements to an existing product. You'll have a direct influence on what gets built and shipped, without layers of bureaucracy between your work and its impact.

What You'll Be Working On

You'll work across the backend and frontend, with a strong focus on PHP and system improvements:

• Stabilize and extend a large PHP 8.4 codebase following a major version migration
• Rebuild and improve a payment processor integration
• Develop automated recurring billing
• Modernize the UI using Tailwind and Flowbite
• Work occasionally on a secondary Ruby on Rails service
• Introduce automated testing and make incremental improvements to code quality
• Investigate performance issues and optimize MySQL queries and indexing
• Use modern AI coding tools as part of your everyday development workflow

You won't be expected to rewrite everything from scratch. Instead, you'll take a practical, incremental approach: understand the system, improve what you touch, and make changes that create real value.

What We're Looking For

Must Have:

• 5+ years of professional PHP experience, with strong knowledge of modern PHP 8.x
• Strong understanding of object-oriented programming, type safety, and clean code
• Experience working with large, mature codebases
• Comfortable working with raw PHP without a modern framework - the platform predates Laravel/Symfony but has already been migrated to PHP 8.4
• Strong MySQL skills, including query optimization, indexing, and performance troubleshooting
• Working knowledge of Ruby on Rails - enough to read, debug, and modify an existing application
• Comfortable working across the full stack, including HTML, Tailwind, and some Vue
• Experience using AI coding tools in your day-to-day development workflow
• A pragmatic mindset toward legacy systems: you improve and modernize what you work on rather than immediately proposing a rewrite
• Ability to scope, discuss, and align on work before implementation
• Fluent, clear, and easily understood English

Nice to Have:

• Experience with payment integrations, especially Stripe
• Infrastructure knowledge, such as VMs, Apache, PHP-FPM, and deployment pipelines
• Not Required
• DevOps ownership
• UI/UX or design experience
• Previous experience in education technology

Why Join?

• Real Ownership: You'll be part of a small, senior team where your work has a direct impact. You'll help scope, build, improve, and ship - without unnecessary layers of approval.
• Meaningful Technical Challenges: This is a mature product with a long history, so there are plenty of opportunities to understand complex systems, solve challenging problems, and modernize them thoughtfully.
• Visible Business Impact: What you build reaches real customers quickly. There's no large committee between your technical decisions and their impact on the product.
• AI-Forward Engineering: AI coding tools are part of the development culture. You'll have the opportunity to use the latest tools to work more efficiently, automate repetitive tasks, and focus on higher-value engineering work.
• Opportunity to Grow: The company is continuing to build out its engineering function, creating room for strong engineers to take on more responsibility and grow with the team.