Backend Developer (Junior / Middle, PHP)

BlazingBoost is an international marketplace for gaming services and an operations platform: boosting, coaching, a services catalog, checkout, payments, booster operations, chat, CRM flows, reporting.

Technically, it is a modular PHP monolith that we are gradually breaking into bounded contexts following DDD. Alongside legacy code, a modern layer is actively in use: DI container, repositories, value objects, layered architecture, DB migrations, console commands, webhooks, push notifications, integrations with payment systems.

You'll work in a team with a clear engineering culture: architecture and code-convention documentation, code review, specifications and task decomposition before starting non-trivial work.

Stack

• Backend: PHP 8.2 as the main runtime; part of the shared code maintains compatibility with older PHP versions; DI container; Composer
• Databases: MySQL / Percona 5.7; Redis; migrations; repositories, query objects
• Infrastructure: Docker, Docker Compose, Nginx
• Frontend (at an overview level): Webpack, Bootstrap 4/5, Sass - server-rendered HTML + modern JS bundles
• Integrations: payment providers, push notifications, chat

Responsibilities

• Build new features in bounded contexts.
• Take part in code review and technical discussions.
• Maintain and evolve the admin panel: CRUD flows, content management, reports.
• Write console commands and API endpoints.
• Take part in the gradual migration of legacy code into a layered DDD architecture.
• Work with DB migrations, optimize queries, design schemas for new domains.
• Cover critical logic with tests (PHPUnit).

Expectations - Junior

• 0.5–1.5 years of commercial PHP experience
• Understanding of OOP, common patterns, SOLID at a "can recognize and explain" level
• MVC - confident understanding of the pattern and how it maps to the code of a real web application
• Basic experience with one of the modern PHP frameworks - Laravel / Symfony (how controllers, routing, ORM / Query Builder, DI, migrations work)
• MySQL: JOINs, indexes, EXPLAIN at a basic level
• Git: feature-branch flow, pull requests, meaningful commits
• Basic understanding of HTTP, REST
• English - at least B1 (Intermediate): able to hold a basic conversation, ask questions, and explain your work
• Readiness to read a lot of other people's code and documentation before writing your own

Expectations — Middle (everything from Junior, plus)

• 2+ years of commercial PHP experience
• Confident OOP
• Production experience with Laravel or Symfony (or another MVC framework at a level that lets you quickly ramp up on a new codebase)
• MySQL: query optimization, schema design, working with migrations
• Readiness to work with code that mixes modern and legacy layers in one repository
• Ability to decompose a feature into tasks and take it to production

Nice to have

• Experience with complex monoliths and their gradual modularization
• Practical understanding and experience with DDD
• Working with payment integrations, webhooks, idempotency
• Understanding of async flows: queues, cron, background workers
• Experience in the e-commerce / marketplace domain
• Basic understanding of frontend builds (Webpack / Laravel Mix) - so you're not put off when a task touches PHTML + a JS bundle together
• Knowledge of and openness to AI tools, and the ability to use them

What we offer

• 8-hour working day
• Flexible schedule - within the team's overlap window you decide when to start and finish
• 20 paid vacation days per year
• 5 paid sick days per year
• National holidays off

Conditions

• Format: fully remote
• Employment: full-time
• Time zone: CET (Central European Time) or Europe/Kyiv
• Hiring process: CV → technical interview → short test task (optional) → final interview
• Probation: 2 months