Senior Software Engineer; Backend, PHP

We are Qualco Group, a leading fintech organisation with over 25 years of experience delivering innovative technology solutions to banks and financial institutions. Serving clients in over 30 countries, we leverage advanced technologies, such as AI and analytics, to develop proprietary software and platforms that accelerate digital transformation and generate lasting value for businesses, society, and the broader economy.

We are looking for a Senior
Software Engineer to join the Credit Institution (CI) team at QUALCO Group. Our team is building the technology platform of a new, fully digital regulated credit institution. We design and operate the systems that take a customer from application to disbursement: digital onboarding, credit decisioning, electronic signing, payments, and loan servicing integrations.

This is greenfield engineering in a regulated fintech environment. You will not be closing tickets in a queue. You will be thinking about how your code affects a real credit disbursement, a customer's checkout at a merchant, or the integrity of a financial reconciliation. We care about correctness, auditability, and clean architecture, and we are building the platform with modern practices from day one.

• Design and build high-performance PHP services, background jobs, and REST APIs that orchestrate real financial transactions end to end;
• Write modern PHP (8.2+) with strict types, PSR standards, and a hexagonal / DDD architecture organised around clear bounded contexts;
• Implement distributed workflows using orchestration patterns (Saga) across identity verification, credit scoring, contract creation, e-signing, disbursement, and ledger updates;
• Integrate with third-party providers across KYC, AML screening, qualified electronic signatures, open banking, card acquiring, and interbank payment rails;
• Review pull requests: catch bugs, enforce standards, and propose better patterns;
• Take ownership of features from design to production, working with product, risk, and compliance stakeholders in an agile setup;
• Contribute to decisions on architecture, code quality, and performance as the platform scales;
• Ensure that all activities and duties are carried out in full compliance with regulatory requirements and supporting the continued implementation of the Group Anti-Bribery and Corruption Policy.

• Backend: PHP 8.2+ (strict types, PSR standards), Relational DB, Redis;
• Frontend:
  React;
• Cloud:
  Microsoft Azure (AKS, Azure SQL, Blob Storage), with a cloud-agnostic design approach;
• Tooling:
  Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, ELK stack;
• Architecture: service-oriented, orchestration-based Saga, DDD, API Gateway.

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong backend expertise;
• Advanced PHP (ideally 8.x): strict types, OOP, design patterns, testing, maintainable application architecture;
• Solid grasp of relational databases: schema design, indexing, query optimisation, transactions, data consistency;
• Proven experience building and maintaining REST APIs with clear contracts, versioning, error handling, security, and backwards compatibility;
• Experience with distributed or mission-critical systems where reliability, latency, and correctness matter;
• Strong testing discipline (unit, integration, contract) and sound judgment on what to test and at which level;
• Security-first mindset: injection risks, data exposure, authentication, authorization, edge cases, failure modes;
• Familiarity with asynchronous processing, retries, idempotency, and eventual consistency patterns;
• Solid experience with Git workflows, CI/CD, and collaborative code review;
• Ability to lead technical discussions, explain trade-offs, and communicate clearly with engineers and non-engineers;
• Ownership mindset: you can take ambiguous, complex problems and drive them to reliable outcomes.

• Background in fintech, payments, lending, banking, or other regulated environments;
• Experience with systems requiring strong consistency, auditability, or reconciliation΄;
• Familiarity with observability practices: structured logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, incident response;
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and production-grade cloud infrastructure;
• Comfort navigating ambiguous requirements and iterating toward clarity;
• Experience influencing technical direction across teams.

As a #Qmember, you'll embody our values every day, fostering a culture of teamwork & integrity, passion for results, quality & excellence, client…