Senior PHP Engineer (Remote, Full-Time) [AR025] (PK)

Smart Working is a remote-first company dedicated to connecting skilled professionals with global teams in meaningful, full-time roles. We prioritize not only the technical fit but also the personal and professional growth of our employees within a supportive community. Our mission is to eliminate geographic barriers and foster long-term success by offering roles where individuals can thrive and feel truly valued. Recognized as one of the highest-rated workplaces on Glassdoor, we invite you to join us and experience a fulfilling remote work environment.

Key Responsibilities
As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will own and maintain large-scale backend systems that process high volumes of data, including GPS, telematics, video, and location information. You will work within a small, experienced team to manage backend systems supporting DVR cameras, event reconstruction, vehicle telematics, fuel, and EV data. Security, GDPR compliance, and video footage retention are critical due to the public sector nature of most clients. Your role will involve evolving the PHP backend that handles real-time alerts from safety hardware events and telematics data, building and maintaining APIs for web and mobile platforms, and leading migrations from Yii2 to Laravel and MariaDB to PostgreSQL. You will also support the decomposition of a monolithic system into microservices and collaborate closely with the developer leading computer vision initiatives. Taking end-to-end ownership of production systems, you will apply architectural judgment to ensure data integrity during migrations and work flexibly within established development practices such as Bitbucket Pipelines and PHPUnit. Rapid onboarding is expected despite limited documentation, and you will contribute as a senior problem-solver in a dynamic, remote-first environment.

Required Qualifications
- Minimum of 8 years of commercial PHP backend development experience at an expert level.
- At least 5 years working with large-scale SaaS or complex production systems, demonstrating the ability to handle high-traffic environments.
- Advanced proficiency with PostgreSQL (3+ years) and API design with third-party integrations (5+ years).
- Experience in high-volume data processing, event-driven systems, or IoT data ingestion pipelines (3+ years).
- Advanced knowledge of Laravel and/or Yii2 frameworks (3+ years).
- Proficient with PHPUnit or equivalent PHP testing frameworks such as Pest or Codeception (3+ years).
- Intermediate experience in microservices architecture or monolith decomposition (2+ years).
- Intermediate experience with AWS or equivalent cloud platforms like Azure or GCP (2+ years).
- Familiarity with telematics, fleet management, logistics, IoT, GPS/location technologies, or connected devices.
- Experience handling video, CCTV, or large media file storage and retention at scale.
- Ability to independently manage mature production systems with limited supervision, demonstrating strong technical judgment.
- Proven track record working with complex systems beyond simple or low-traffic applications.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits
- Experience with MariaDB/MySQL at scale, particularly relevant to ongoing migrations to PostgreSQL.
- Front-end development experience, although this role is fully backend-focused.
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, especially Bitbucket Pipelines; alternatives like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins are also valuable.
- Exposure to AI or computer vision technologies, including object detection frameworks such as YOLO, or machine learning/image processing pipelines.
- Experience integrating event-driven or IoT-style data ingestion with large media files, ideally alongside ML pipelines.
- AI expertise is considered a plus but is not a requirement.

Smart Working uses AI tools to assist in reviewing applications and assessing candidate materials; however, all final hiring decisions are made by human recruiters. Candidates interested in learning more about data processing during recruitment are encouraged to inquire further.

This role offers the opportunity to join a highly rated remote-first company, work on impactful public sector projects, and take ownership of complex backend systems in a collaborative and growth-oriented environment.