Senior Backend PHP Engineer
Fully Remote (UK Based) | Up to £70,000 + Excellent Benefits
We’re partnered with one of the UK’s leading EdTech organisations, trusted by millions of students, teachers and parents every day.
As the business continues to invest heavily in its engineering capability, they’re looking for a Senior Backend PHP Engineer to join a highly collaborative platform team focused on building scalable, reliable and maintainable backend services.
You’ll play a key part in modernising enterprise-scale systems, improving platform performance and helping shape the future of a product used across the UK education sector.
What you’ll be doing
- Designing and building scalable backend services using PHP and Symfony
- Developing high-quality, object-oriented software following engineering best practices
- Modernising legacy components whilst helping evolve the wider platform architecture
- Collaborating with Product Engineers, Platform Engineers and DevOps to improve performance, scalability and reliability
- Writing clean, maintainable and well-tested code
- Optimising MySQL databases and improving application performance
- Contributing to architectural discussions and technical decision-making
- Using modern AI engineering tools such as Claude and Cursor to accelerate development and improve productivity
What we’re looking for
You’ll ideally bring experience with:
- Strong commercial PHP development experience
- Symfony (or another modern PHP framework)
- Object-Oriented Programming principles and clean software design
- MySQL and relational database optimisation
- RESTful APIs and backend service development
- Git and modern software engineering practices
- A passion for writing maintainable, scalable code
Nice to have
- Experience working on large-scale enterprise platforms
- AWS or cloud-native environments
- Docker or containerisation
- Event-driven architecture or messaging technologies
- Experience using AI development tools such as Claude, Cursor or similar
- An interest in Domain-Driven Design, refactoring and software architecture
Why join?
This is an engineering-led business where developers are trusted to solve problems, influence technical direction and continually improve the platform.
You’ll be joining a collaborative team that embraces modern engineering practices, invests heavily in developer tooling and encourages experimentation with AI to enhance software delivery.
You’ll have the opportunity to:
- Solve genuinely interesting engineering challenges at scale
- Influence architecture and platform evolution
- Work alongside experienced engineers in a collaborative environment
- Use modern AI-assisted development tools as part of your day-to-day workflow
- Join a remote-first business that genuinely values flexibility and work-life balance
If you’re passionate about backend engineering and enjoy building software that’s scalable, maintainable and makes a real-world impact, we’d love to hear from you.
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