Lead PHP Engineer - Data Products
Reward Gateway, part of Edenred, is a global leader in benefits and employee engagement. We help businesses attract, engage, and retain top talent through strategic reward, recognition, and well-being solutions.
Guided by our shared missions - ‘Making the World a Better Place to Work’ and ‘Enriching Connections, For Good’ - we’re committed to transforming workplaces and improving people’s daily lives.
Our team embodies entrepreneurial spirit, innovation, and respect. We push boundaries, speak up, and stay human, fostering a culture where imagination thrives.
Your Role in our Mission:
An opportunity has become available for a PHP Engineering Lead to join the Data Products team within our engineering organisation. In this role, you will guide engineers through complex technical decisions across a broad range of disciplines, contribute to design reviews, and create alignment across teams, balancing long-term technical strategy with the realities of short-term delivery. You will manage team performance and support career development across backend, frontend and analytics domains, and work closely with Heads of Engineering and Product teams — and in close partnership with the Data Platform team — to ensure reliable, high-quality delivery aligned with the underlying platform strategy.
An opportunity has become available for a PHP Engineering Lead to join the Data Products team within our engineering organisation. In this role, you will guide engineers through complex technical decisions across a broad range of disciplines, contribute to design reviews, and create alignment across teams, balancing long-term technical strategy with the realities of short-term delivery. You will manage team performance and support career development across backend, frontend and analytics domains, and work closely with Heads of Engineering and Product teams — and in close partnership with the Data Platform team — to ensure reliable, high-quality delivery aligned with the underlying platform strategy.
The Data Products team is the user-facing team that turns foundational platform data into products which show our users the value the Engagement platform delivers. It is a cross-functional group of backend, frontend and analytics engineers, building both the insight-specific data models and the backend services and frontend components that power those products. A core part of how the team works is building reusable capability rather than one-off products: shared services and components that keep the user experience consistent and let new products be delivered faster.
This is a hybrid role that would require presence in our Sofia or Plovdiv office at least twice per week, as agreed.
Lead and develop a high-performing engineering team
- Lead a cross-functional team spanning backend, frontend and analytics engineering disciplines, fostering collaboration across different technical domains
- Monitor individual and team performance and promote accountability
- Support hiring, onboarding and continuous development of engineers
- Drive predictable Agile delivery and support effective planning
Shape and contribute to architecture strategy
- Support the transition toward microservices and event driven patterns
- Participate in architecture reviews and cross team planning
- Maintain clear architectural documentation and architectural decision records
- Work closely with data platform lead to ensure data products and platform strategy is well aligned
Ensure high-performance and scalable engineering
- Define, measure and report on platform performance KPIs
- Guide teams in designing scalable, resilient backend systems and data pipelines
- Support performance investigations and platform optimisation efforts
Lead API design, governance, and documentation
- Define and champion consistent API design principles, including data contracts and schema governance where applicable
- Oversee the governance of API changes, versioning and documentation quality
- Ensure APIs are discoverable, well-structured and reliable
Drive security excellence
- Establish and maintain a security-first culture across engineering teams
- Lead threat modelling exercises and coordinate vulnerability remediation
Champion quality assurance and testing standards
- Promote shared ownership of quality, encouraging teams to build robust automated testing
- Ensure test coverage, test reliability and continuous improvement of testing practices
- Champion data quality practices including data model testing, schema validation and observability of data products
Reduce technical debt and drive system optimisation
- Lead refactoring and modernisation initiatives
- Prioritise and track improvements to system health
- Promote best practices in performance tuning, code quality and maintainability
Improve engineering efficiencies through frameworks and tooling
- Participate in decisions on new frameworks, tooling and engineering approaches
- Standardise tooling and processes across teams
- Look for opportunities to improve development workflows and reduce friction
Strengthen documentation and reporting standards
- Define documentation guidelines and ensure they are followed
- Implement structured incident reporting and post incident review processes
- Promote clear, accessible documentation as part of engineering culture
- Proven experience in PHP and MySQL
- Proven experience in a technical leadership role working on large scale, business critical SaaS platforms
- Proven experience leading cross-functional engineering teams spanning backend, frontend and analytics disciplines, with the depth to engage credibly across all three
- Strong engineering background spanning backend systems, data modelling and tooling, and frontend development
- Solid understanding of system architecture, microservices, event driven systems and API design
- Good knowledge of modern cloud environments, CI/CD practices and observability tools
- Experience with performance tuning, debugging and scalability challenges
- Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to build trust across teams
- Practical leadership style focused on enabling engineers and removing blockers
- Strong analytical and critical thinking skills
- A proactive, improvement minded approach to engineering
Nice to have skills but not essential (the following technologies will be used in the future so you will gain exposure / experience with them)
- Python
- React
- Typescript
- Elasticsearch
- AWS
- Screening Interview with the Talent Acquisition Partner
- First Stage Online technical interview with the Head of Engineering and an Engineering Lead
At Reward Gateway | Edenred, we are committed to ensuring an inclusive and accessible recruitment process for all candidates. If you have any specific requirements or need reasonable adjustments at any stage of the recruitment journey, please let your Talent Acquisition Partner know. Your needs are important to us, and we want to ensure an equitable experience for every candidate.
Be comfortable. Be you.
We want every employee to feel comfortable bringing their passion, creativity and individuality to work. We value all cultures, backgrounds and experiences, because we believe diversity drives innovation and makes us stronger. Our approach to hiring and building teams is about more than filling roles - it’s about creating an environment where everyone can thrive, feel supported, and contribute to our mission of making the world a better place to work!
Be comfortable. Be you.
We want every employee to feel comfortable bringing their passion, creativity and individuality to work. We value all cultures, backgrounds and experiences, because we believe diversity drives innovation and makes us stronger. Our approach to hiring and building teams is about more than filling roles - it’s about creating an environment where everyone can thrive, feel supported, and contribute to our mission of making the world a better place to work!