PHP Developer

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior PHP Developer to help lead the design and evolution of our product — a microservice-based Laravel architecture spanning multiple functional areas, with newer services built on a custom in-house micro-framework (leveraging Lumen packages rather than the stock Lumen framework). This is a senior, hands-on role: you'll own architectural decisions, design and optimize services, and act as a technical anchor for the team — setting the bar on code quality, design, and engineering best practices.

What You'll Do

• Design, architect, and optimize microservices across a distributed Laravel environment, including our custom Lumen-based packages.
• Define and evolve service boundaries, inter-service communication, and API contracts.
• Drive performance, scalability, and reliability improvements across services.
• Lead code reviews and guide the team on design decisions, patterns, and best practices.
• Set and enforce engineering standards — testing, documentation, and maintainability.
• Mentor mid-level and senior engineers; raise the overall technical bar.
• Own features end-to-end across multiple service areas — from data model to API contract.

What We're Looking For

• 8–12 years of professional PHP development, with deep hands-on Laravel experience.
• Proven software architecture expertise — designing and optimizing microservices, service boundaries, distributed data, and API contracts.
• Strong track record of leading code reviews and mentoring engineers on design and best practices.
• Expert-level understanding of SOLID, design patterns, and architectural trade-offs.
• Comfort working within custom/proprietary frameworks and packages (Lumen-based), not just off-the-shelf tooling.
• Strong grasp of modern PHP (8.x) and OOP fundamentals.
• Proficient SQL skills (MySQL/PostgreSQL) and query optimization.
• Solid experience with REST APIs, Git, and automated testing (PHPUnit/Pest).

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with Lumen — a strong advantage, given our custom Lumen-based services.
• Experience building or extending micro-frameworks / custom packages.
• Message queues / async processing (RabbitMQ, Redis, Laravel Queues).
• Caching strategies and event-driven design.
• API gateways and service discovery patterns.
• Based out of Chennai, as majority of the team is in Chennai and a hybrid model to get the team running