Remote Software Engineer - PHP Backend

Position Description:

Service Trade empowers commercial service contractors in fire protection, HVAC, mechanical, electrical, and beyond to service smarter and scale faster. Our platform helps thousands of contractors maximize technician productivity, deliver digital-first customer experiences, and grow profitably. When skilled techs are hard to find and manual systems slow you down, Service Trade is how the best contractors pull ahead.

Under the hood, that mission runs on a serious piece of engineering: a multi-tenant SaaS platform built on PHP, Doctrine, MySQL, MongoDB, and AWS, processing the real-time workflows that keep commercial service operations moving. It's battle-tested, revenue-generating, and architecturally complex. It's also ready for its next chapter.

We're hiring a Staff Engineer to help write that chapter. You'll join a team that's investing in the long-term health of this platform: evolving the architecture, modernizing incrementally, improving reliability, leaning into AI acceleration tooling, and building the infrastructure to scale the next phase of growth, all without breaking what works for the thousands of contractors who depend on us every day.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll own critical architectural decisions across backend and infrastructure, mentor engineers, and shape how we build software in this new world of agentic AI. If you've ever looked at a complex production system and thought "I know how to make this better, one piece at a time," this is the job.

Why Service Trade:

• Real problems at real scale. Sharded MySQL, MongoDB read models, event-driven async processing, multi-tenant isolation: this isn't a CRUD app. You'll work on genuinely interesting distributed systems challenges with real customers depending on the outcome.
• Modernization with purpose. Our platform has years of production-hardened domain logic. The opportunity isn't to rewrite it, it's to evolve it. Incrementally migrate frameworks, extract services where it makes sense, adopt modern patterns, and improve developer experience, all while keeping the lights on for thousands of customers. This is the kind of work that separates good engineers from great ones.
• First-Class Tooling. You will be equipped with the latest AI-assisted tooling available to help you navigate, refactor, and modernize our complex codebase more efficiently.
• Influence without bureaucracy. This is a team where a staff engineer's voice carries real weight. You won't be writing RFCs that disappear into a committee. You'll propose a direction, build consensus, and ship it.

Key Responsibilities and Activities:

Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Own and evolve the architecture of our core backend platform: a large 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 our event pipeline: domain events, SQS-based async processing, MongoDB projections, and worker infrastructure
• Make and document architectural decisions, weighing trade-offs and building consensus across the team

Backend Engineering & Data Performance

• 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 MongoDB document models and projections via Doctrine ODM
• Architect message-driven workflows: SQS producers/consumers, long-polling workers, idempotency, DLQ/redrive strategies, deduplication, and…