We're looking for a hands-on Senior Backend Engineer to help shape the direction of our backend architecture, microservices, and practices across multiple squads. You'll operate as a senior technical expert, collaborating with frontend teams and engineering to elevate the backend craft at CreditorWatch.
In this role your influence will span a product group. You'll drive cross-cutting backend initiatives, set coding standards, lead strategic discussions, and champion backend quality across the board.
This is an opportunity for someone who loves building robust, scalable backend systems, has strong PHP Symfony) experience, and wants to lead by doing.
- Hands-on development: Write, review, and maintain high-quality, scalable and secure backend code primarily in PHP using Symfony frameworks.
- Backend architecture mastery: Define and advocate for coding best practices, microservices architecture guidelines, API design principles, testing strategies, and maintainability principles across teams.
- Microservices development: Design, build, and maintain microservices that are resilient, observable, and performant. Champion service-oriented architecture principles and distributed system best practices.
- Database expertise: Design and optimize database schemas, queries, and data models across various database technologies. Ensure data integrity, performance, and scalability.
- AWS cloud infrastructure: Leverage AWS services to build scalable, cost-effective solutions. Work with services like EC2, RDS, Lambda, S3, API Gateway, and other relevant AWS offerings.
- API design & integration: Create and maintain RESTful APIs and integrate with third-party services. Ensure APIs are welldocumented, versioned, and follow industry standards.
- Security champion: Advocate security and privacy best practices across backend applications, from secure API endpoints to safe handling of sensitive data and proper authentication/authorization mechanisms.
- Observability & monitoring: Implement comprehensive logging, monitoring, and alerting using analytics tools. Build observable systems that provide insights into performance, errors, and business metrics.
- Agile methodology: Work effectively in sprint-based development cycles. Participate in sprint planning, daily standups, retrospectives, and deliver features within sprint commitments.
- Tech mentorship: Guide engineers through informal mentoring, code reviews, and pairing in writing secure, maintainable and well-tested backend codebase. Elevate engineering thinking through high-quality feedback and modelling best practices.
- Department-wide engagement: Present technical decisions, demos, or initiatives to the broader engineering department and advocate for backend improvements company-wide.
- Proactive improvement: Identify and drive improvements to tooling, architecture, and developer experience before being asked.
- Polyglot mindset: Comfortably pick up and evaluate new tools, libraries, or frameworks where appropriate. Understand when and why a new technology is (or isn't) a good fit.
Core Technical Skills:
- You're a highly experienced backend engineer with expertise in PHP, specifically Symfony framework.
- Strong experience with microservices architecture and distributed systems design.
- Extensive working knowledge of databases (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL databases).
- Proven experience with AWS cloud services and infrastructure as code.
- Solid understanding of RESTful API design principles and best practices.
Quality & Security Focus:
- You care deeply about shipping high-quality, robust, and secure backend systems.
- You have a deep understanding of backend security principles (authentication, authorization, data encryption, secure coding practices) and how to implement them.
- You've worked on large-scale backend applications and know how to balance pragmatism with scalability.
Integration & Automation:
- Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment strategies.
- Familiarity with analytics and monitoring tools for system observability such as DataDog.
Collaboration & Leadership:
- You're a strong communicator and can influence across squads and disciplines.
- You're comfortable navigating ambiguous requirements and creating clarity for others.
- You regularly lead by example through clean, simple, and extensible code.
System Thinking:
- You've built observable backend systems — you know how to instrument code for metrics that matter, and how to use them to debug and optimize performance.
- You proactively improve systems, not just code – advocating for better testing, observability, and deployment strategies.
- You're a strategic thinker who can align backend architecture with broader business goals.
Continuous Learning:
- You're constantly learning and exploring how emerging backend technologies might be applied to real business problems.
- Experience working in agile/sprint-based development environments.
Good at English skills.
Nice to Haves
- Experience with containerisation technologies Docker, Kubernetes).
- Familiarity with message queuing systems SQS.
- Knowledge of caching strategies and technologies Redis, Memcached).
- Experience working in a product-led company or SaaS environment.
- Be happy to coach, mentor and train less senior colleagues.
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