Senior PHP Backend Developer

Team: 9 people (3 Backend Engineers, 2 Frontend Engineers, 1 QA Engineer, 1 Product Manager, 1 UX Designer, CTO)

About the Company

We are an international proptech company developing a real estate investment platform that enables investors to co-own income-generating properties or finance real estate professionals. The platform serves a growing community of more than 27,000 investors and is focused on building modern, scalable financial technology products.

We're building an AI-first engineering team and are looking for a Senior PHP Backend Developer who enjoys taking ownership of backend development end-to-end. In this role, you'll be responsible for coding, testing, deployment, cloud infrastructure, and leveraging AI tools to maximize engineering productivity.

What You'll Do

• Build scalable backend services using Laravel with clean, high-performance code
• Write Unit and Feature tests first (Pest / PHPUnit) following TDD principles
• Own deployments on Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Cloud Build)
• Use AI development tools such as Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Codex, and Cursor to improve development speed and quality
• Monitor application performance, identify bottlenecks, and continuously improve the architecture

Requirements

• 5+ years of commercial experience with PHP and Laravel
• Strong experience with Test-Driven Development (TDD)
• Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, including Docker, Artifact Registry, and serverless services
• Proven experience using AI-assisted development tools in daily engineering workflows
• Strong knowledge of Eloquent ORM, database indexing, and query optimization
• Experience building secure applications (OWASP, secure APIs, encryption)
• Solid understanding of MySQL/PostgreSQL, REST APIs, and OOP

Must-have experience:

• Laravel — 5+ years
• Google Cloud Platform — 5+ years
• PostgreSQL — 5+ years
• Gemini — 2+ years
• Google Antigravity (Google AI development tool) — 6+ months

The Bar

We're looking for someone who combines deep Laravel expertise with an AI-first engineering workflow. AI should amplify your productivity, not replace strong software engineering fundamentals.

Nice to Have

• Laravel Pulse / Horizon
• GitHub Actions
• Open-source contributions (PHP or AI developer tooling)

Why Join

• Modern AI-first engineering environment
• Access to the latest AI development tools and subscriptions
• Google Cloud credits
• High level of ownership and autonomy over technical decisions
• Opportunity to shape architecture and engineering practices in a growing product company