Senior Laravel Developer

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Laravel Developer with 8 to 10 years of professional software development expertise, specializing in the Laravel/PHP ecosystem. The ideal candidate will demonstrate strong hands-on engineering skills and the ability to make architecture-level decisions for complex, scalable, and distributed backend systems. This role involves designing, developing, and maintaining high-quality production software while contributing to system architecture and mentoring other developers.

Key Responsibilities

- Develop and maintain backend applications using expert-level knowledge of the Laravel framework and modern PHP practices.
- Utilize deep understanding of Laravel internals, including Service Container, Service Providers, Middleware, Queues, Events/Listeners, Jobs, Eloquent ORM, Policies, Commands, Scheduling, Caching, and Dependency Injection.
- Write clean, maintainable, reusable, testable, and production-ready code following engineering principles such as SOLID, DRY, KISS, separation of concerns, and clean architecture.
- Design and maintain RESTful APIs and microservices with clear service boundaries and well-defined contracts.
- Implement robust authentication, authorization, API security, validation, rate limiting, caching, concurrency, and transaction management.
- Contribute to both high-level and low-level system design, focusing on scalable, fault-tolerant, and maintainable backend architectures.
- Apply design-for-failure principles including graceful degradation, retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, idempotency, fault isolation, and recovery strategies.
- Identify and resolve architectural bottlenecks to optimize performance in high-volume, critical systems.
- Make informed trade-offs balancing performance, scalability, consistency, reliability, complexity, and maintainability.
- Participate in architectural reviews and provide technical guidance to engineering teams.
- Analyze complex engineering problems and develop efficient, maintainable solutions using strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and computational complexity.
- Profile applications, optimize queries, implement caching strategies, manage memory utilization, and tune performance.
- Diagnose and resolve complex production issues, including race conditions and distributed system failures.
- Design and manage MongoDB data models tailored to application access patterns, scalability, and performance needs.
- Optimize MongoDB performance through indexing, aggregation pipelines, query optimization, replication, and transaction management.
- Make strategic decisions regarding data consistency, service ownership, denormalization, data duplication, and inter-service communication in microservices architectures.
- Take ownership of solutions from requirements gathering through architecture, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and production support.
- Conduct thorough code reviews, enforce engineering standards, and identify architectural, security, performance, scalability, and maintainability concerns.
- Mentor junior developers and establish coding standards, best practices, and architectural guidelines.
- Promote automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, observability, logging, monitoring, and effective production debugging.
- Proactively identify technical risks and design systems resilient to failures, traffic spikes, and evolving business requirements.

Required Qualifications

- 8 to 10 years of professional software development experience with a strong focus on Laravel and PHP.
- Expert knowledge of Laravel framework internals and backend engineering best practices.
- Proven experience designing and maintaining RESTful APIs and microservices.
- Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, API security, caching, concurrency, and transaction management.
- Demonstrated ability to design scalable, fault-tolerant, and maintainable backend architectures.
- Solid grasp of algorithms, data structures, and performance optimization techniques.
- Extensive hands-on experience with MongoDB in production, including schema design, indexing, aggregation, replication, and transactions.
- Experience working within distributed and microservices-based architectures.
- Ability to independently evaluate technical requirements and propose robust architectural solutions.
- Strong code review skills and experience mentoring developers.
- Proficiency with automated testing, CI/CD, observability, and production debugging.

This position is ideal for a senior backend engineer who is not only an expert Laravel developer but also a strategic technical problem solver capable of delivering reliable, scalable, and optimized production systems.