Senior Backend Engineer (Laravel)

About The RoleWe're a digital healthcare company building the platform that powers our clinical and pharmacy operations. We're expanding that platform significantly this year, and we're looking for a senior backend engineer to help design and build its next generation.You'll take ownership of backend services from initial architecture through deployment and long-term maintenance. You'll design scalable systems, implement new features, review code, improve application performance, and continuously reduce technical debt.You'll regularly switch between multiple products and projects, helping teams deliver features quickly without compromising quality or maintainability. Beyond writing code, you'll participate in architecture discussions, mentor developers, review pull requests, and help shape the engineering standards followed across the company.As AI continues to play an increasingly important role in our products, you'll also help build intelligent workflows, integrate AI services, and explore new ways of using modern language models to improve customer experiences and internal operations.What You'll Be DoingDesigning and building backend services in Laravel, from architecture through to productionWorking on core platform capabilities: data modelling, APIs, background processing, and integrationsDesigning secure, well-documented, versioned REST APIsBuilding event-driven and asynchronous systems with queues and background jobsOptimising database performance and application scalabilityWriting automated tests and helping improve our engineering and release practicesIntegrating third-party services, including commerce, logistics, and AI/LLM APIsReviewing code and helping raise the overall standard of the teamRequirementsWhat we're looking for7+ years of professional backend development, with at least 3 years of strong Laravel experience in production systems you helped design — we care more about what you've built than the exact number of yearsDeep understanding of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), SOLID principles, design patterns, and system designStrong data modelling and system design instincts, and the ability to reason about trade-offsExperience with Shopify APIs, Eloquent ORM optimisation, MySQL performance tuning, Redis, queue-based systems, AWS infrastructure, and scalable REST APIs is essentialSolid MySQL depth (indexing, query optimisation, performance under growth), plus Redis and queue-based asynchronous processingExperience with AWS, Docker, Linux, Git, CI/CD, application monitoring, and performance optimization is essentialTesting as a habit, you write tests, you expect CI to catch problems, and you take reliability seriouslyWorking knowledge of AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch), enough to be self-sufficientClear written communication and the ability to document and defend design decisionsNice to haveExperience in a regulated domain (healthcare, fintech, or similar) where compliance and auditability are design inputsMulti-tenant SaaS experienceLLM integration work (Anthropic or OpenAI APIs), with an interest in evaluation and reliability rather than demosShopify API experienceEvent-driven architecture in productionTech stackPHP 8.x / Laravel (Horizon, Queues, Events, Scheduler) MySQL Redis REST APIs AWS Docker GitHub Actions Anthropic & OpenAI APIs Vue.js + Inertia on the frontend (this is a backend-focused role; frontend fluency is welcome but not required) The challenges you'll be working onAs part of our engineering team, you'll work on a variety of technical challenges, including:Designing backend systems capable of handling millions of requestsBuilding AI-powered products and integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into real-world workflowsArchitecting and developing greenfield applications from concept to productionScaling and optimising large Laravel codebasesDesigning secure, maintainable, and high-performance REST APIsBuilding event-driven and asynchronous systems using queues and background processingOptimising database performance, caching strategies, and application scalabilityImproving developer experience through automation, tooling, and engineering best practicesBuilding reliable cloud-native applications on AWSBenefitsWe're an equal-opportunity employer. As a regulated healthcare business, the successful candidate will undergo a basic background check.