Software Engineer - PHP Backend

About the role

Service Trade empowers commercial service contractors in fire protection, HVAC, mechanical, electrical, and beyond to service smarter and scale faster. The platform helps thousands of contractors maximize technician productivity, deliver digital‑first customer experiences, and grow profitably.

• Own and evolve the architecture of the core backend platform: PHP/Doctrine monolith with event‑driven async processing and CQRS read models, and a growing number of Node microservices.
• Drive technical strategy for database sharding, read‑replica routing, multi‑tenant isolation, and schema migration across MySQL shards.
• Lead incremental modernization efforts, including migrating frameworks, extracting services, and adopting modern PHP patterns while maintaining production stability and velocity.
• Design and improve the event pipeline: domain events, SQS‑based async processing, Mongo
  
  DB projections, and worker infrastructure.
• Make and document architectural decisions, weighing trade‑offs and building consensus across the team.

• Design, build, and maintain scalable RESTful APIs and backend services in PHP.
• Own query performance across sharded MySQL databases: analyze execution plans, design indexing strategies, identify and eliminate slow queries, and optimize Doctrine ORM/DBAL usage to prevent N+1s and unnecessary hydration.
• Lead schema design and migration strategy across shards, balancing normalization, query performance, and operational safety.
• Write and optimize complex queries across sharded MySQL databases using Doctrine ORM/DBAL.
• Build and operate Mongo
  
  DB document models and projections via Doctrine ODM.
• Architect message‑driven workflows: SQS producers/consumers, long‑polling workers, idempotency, DLQ/redrive strategies, deduplication, and visibility‑timeout tuning.
• Implement and improve caching strategies across APCu, Redis, and query‑level caches, including stampede protection.
• Integrate with third‑party systems (accounting platforms, identity providers, search infrastructure).

• Own and improve Git Hub Actions CI/CD pipelines, covering build, test, and packaging stages with matrix strategies and artifact caching.
• Manage and optimize Docker‑based development and CI environments (multi‑service Compose stacks, Local Stack for AWS mocking, ephemeral database strategies).
• Partner with SRE on QA server provisioning, production infrastructure, deployment processes, and observability, contributing Cloud Formation changes and monitoring improvements as needed.
• Champion environment parity between development, CI, QA, and production.
• Ensure new features have appropriate application‑level observability and work with SRE to surface metrics, dashboards, and alerts.

• Believe in and practice the use of the latest AI tools and concepts to achieve maximum productivity.
• Collaborate with the Principal AI Engineer to champion an "AI‑first" engineering culture, providing guidance and best practices for using AI as a force multiplier.
• Use AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar LLM‑based assistants to accelerate code comprehension, refactoring, and modernization of legacy systems.
• Ensure proper attention to security, performance, and trustworthiness of AI features.

• Mentor senior and mid‑level engineers through code reviews, pairing, and architectural guidance.
• Raise the bar on code quality, testing practices, and operational readiness; identify systemic issues (tech debt, reliability gaps, developer experience friction) and drive solutions.
• Collaborate with product managers, frontend engineers, QA, and devops to shape the technical approach for major initiatives.

• 8+ years of professional software development experience with deep expertise in backend PHP.
• Proven track record operating and evolving large, production‑grade PHP codebases.
• Expert‑level MySQL knowledge: tuning execution plans, indexing strategies, locking behavior, and query optimization across replicated and sharded databases.
• Experience using AI assistants (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex) for…