Senior Backend Engineer

We are working with an established technology company that is growing its team and looking for a Senior PHP Full Stack Developer. This is a permanent role based in Newcastle upon Tyne, with a salary of 50000 to 60000. The role offers autonomy, visibility and the opportunity to work across both backend and frontend layers of a modern, containerised application using Laravel, the TALL stack, Docker, Redis and AWS.

Requirements

• Strong commercial experience with modern PHP 8.0+ and Laravel 10 or later, with a focus on building robust, maintainable systems.
• Confident working across the full stack, including templating (Blade), reactive components (Livewire) and modern frontend tooling (Vite, TailwindCSS, Node).
• Solid understanding of database design and optimisation, preferably with MySQL, and experience working with Redis for caching and queues.
• Comfortable working within containerised environments such as Docker and docker-compose.
• Practical experience implementing and debugging background job processing and queue-based workflows.
• Familiar with version control and modern development workflows using Git, pull requests and peer reviews.
• Clear communicator capable of explaining technical concepts and collaborating effectively with team members across disciplines.
• A pragmatic approach to testing and quality assurance, ideally with exposure to PHPUnit and CI practices.
• Ability to work independently on larger tasks while contributing to the overall technical direction of the project.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of backend services, ensuring scalable, testable and maintainable architecture within a modern Laravel environment.
• Take ownership of service-layer logic, addressing existing gaps and implementing clean, modular solutions to support integrations and business operations.
• Collaborate with the team to evolve queue job handling, improving reliability, traceability and error management across asynchronous processes.
• Work closely with DevOps and QA to enhance CI/CD pipelines, ensuring automated testing and deployments align with quality standards.
• Maintain and optimise local development and Docker-based environments, including multiple queue workers and supporting services.
• Proactively identify and resolve technical debt by reviewing existing items and shaping a clear path to production-readiness.
• Contribute to system integration efforts, particularly around third-party services such as RingCentral, Twilio, AWS and internal APIs.
• Uphold code quality through peer reviews, consistent patterns and mentoring others on best practices across the full stack.
• Drive improvements in frontend tooling and workflow, collaborating on UI components built with Livewire, TailwindCSS and Vite.
• Champion a culture of continuous improvement, staying current with Laravel ecosystem updates and contributing to strategic technical decisions.