Senior PHP Developer
Summary
This role involves building a new cloud-native PHP microservices platform from the ground up, with a focus on high-scale performance, AWS integration, and the daily use of agentic AI coding tools. The engineer will have full ownership of architecture, production quality, and observability in a hybrid Sydney-based environment.
The Opportunity
We're hiring a Senior PHP Software Engineer to join one of Australia's most well-resourced engineering organisations, building a next generation platform from the ground up.
This is a rare chance to shape a cloud-native PHP platform from day one, rather than maintaining or extending legacy code. The organisation processes significant transaction volumes for millions of customers across Australia and is investing heavily in AI as a core part of its engineering workflow, under experienced leadership with a track record of building world-class digital products.
This is a full-ownership role, not a build-and-hand-off position. You'll own architecture decisions, production quality, observability, and reliability for whatever you ship, designing the platform end to end rather than integrating on top of a system someone else built.
What You'll Be Working On
What We're Looking For
We're hiring a Senior PHP Software Engineer to join one of Australia's most well-resourced engineering organisations, building a next generation platform from the ground up.
This is a rare chance to shape a cloud-native PHP platform from day one, rather than maintaining or extending legacy code. The organisation processes significant transaction volumes for millions of customers across Australia and is investing heavily in AI as a core part of its engineering workflow, under experienced leadership with a track record of building world-class digital products.
This is a full-ownership role, not a build-and-hand-off position. You'll own architecture decisions, production quality, observability, and reliability for whatever you ship, designing the platform end to end rather than integrating on top of a system someone else built.
What You'll Be Working On
- Designing and building production-grade PHP microservices and cloud-native platform components from scratch
- Owning advanced MySQL database design, query optimisation, and performance tuning at scale
- Integrating AWS services including S3, SQS, SNS, and Cognito into a modern cloud-native architecture
- Using agentic coding tools including Claude Code, Copilot, and Gemini CLI as a day-one engineering requirement, not a nice-to-have
- Owning incident response, observability via AWS CloudWatch and Dynatrace, and reliability for everything you ship
- Working with real architectural autonomy, shaping technical direction alongside product, design, and QA rather than just executing tickets
What We're Looking For
- Strong, recent production PHP experience in a cloud-native environment, not agency or WordPress work
- Hands-on experience building scalable, decoupled microservices with high standards on code maintainability
- Advanced MySQL knowledge including indexing, query performance tuning, and database optimisation at scale
- Solid AWS experience and familiarity with cloud-native application development
- A track record of owning systems end to end including incident response under real business consequences
- Active daily use of agentic coding tools with concrete examples of how they've changed how you work
- Genuine enthusiasm for architecting a platform from scratch rather than working within an existing framework
- Competitive base salary, open for the right candidate
- Hybrid, 3 days office-based, Sydney CBD